Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance towards ISPs that provide anything less than one gigabit per second.
This but unironically.
I was serious.
A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
271–280 of 361 posts
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Edit: apologies, missed the "a few weeks ago" and didn't realize it was still an ongoing matter. Please disregard. --- Original comment: > then I got the fraudulent bill, and they autopaid themselves the fraudulent bill. And yet you let them do it, didn't recall the payment, and seemingly didn't even follow up on the threat? Looks like mission accomplished for them, of course the customer service monkey is going to d…
How did you read that? This is an ongoing situation.
Edited, my bad, I need to read more carefully.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well. The incumbents have been lobbying against this heavily, winning state laws banning municipalities from setting up their own fiber in some places.
Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity. It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.
Mostly because we're pushing the limits of long-range copper to offer currently-standard bandwidth levels, where as fiber is just getting started (you can go to 100Gbit on the same fiber by just swapping the optics at either end).
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#274This story is so relatable it hurts. The amount of my time ISP executives have wasted by their malicious decision to absolutely gut “technical” support… It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works. I’ve had issues like this with all 3 of my past 3 ISPs, which included Comcast, Astound (WaveG), and CenturyLink. The last t…
> It should be illegal to run a “support” department where most agents don’t understand the bare minimum of basics about how the internet works.
Recently when Optimum in NYC broke their IPv6, only 1 out of the 5 tech support people I talked to knew what IPv6 is. None of them fixed the problem. The problem resolved after a couple of days, so I assume someone finally noticed their infrastructure was broken. Incredibly frustrating to deal with an impenetrable wall of incompetence.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can't document your attempts to document and resolve the issue in your FCC complaint it will have far less credibility.
Ok, thank you! I'm gonna gather as much documentation as I can. Considering the fact that I get full speeds everywhere whenever I'm using a VPN, am I right to assume that there is an issue with AT&T's internal routing? And, that issue doesn't effect every path? I'm not really an expert at doing networking stuff, but I wanna gather as much empirical data to construct a report and do statistical tests n stuff.
You can't see everything from your own connection, but you can see a lot.
Take some pcaps of downloads that don't work. See if there's some common thing going on. Are you getting packets slowly with minimal loss or are there many missing packets? Does it seem like a path MTU issue [1]? Is the RTT reasonable?
Traceroutes from your side aren't the most helpful, but see what's the same and different between download IPs that work well and those that don't. If we assume congestion is from the internet to you, traceroutes from the download servers that don't work would be most useful, but that's hard to get. Sometimes you can find a hosting provider with test download urls and a looking glass, which can be pretty helpful if that's what you're experiencing.
Definitely look at ipv4 and ipv6. It's pretty common to get different routing between the same two endpoints on v4 and v6, so you get more debugging.
If it is a routing problem, be sure you're testing same IPs for download between native and VPN, if you download by hostname and the DNS resolves differently, try both IPs both ways... maybe you're just getting poor selection from DNS which can be addressed in different wayss. If your native DNS always gives you cross country servers and your VPN is local and gets local servers, there you go.
But if you do figure out the problem, you also need to find a way to escalate. Chances are phone support isn't going to be super helpful. Explore reddit to see if people get results there, find out what the replacement for dslreports is, etc.
Edit to add: when you do reach out, you want to share a concise summary and easy to repeat test; not so much all the research you did behind it. But ... that test should include multiple sources for the download or support will say it's a single site issue and close the ticket.
[1] I always blame PMTU, what does my test here show http://pmtud.enslaves.us/ If you don't get OK in all the boxes, that could be part of the problem... But that's usually slow start, not slow throughput after starting.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#276In the UK we are lucky to have a bit better of the system - Openreach (or Virgin) own the cables, and ISPs pay Openreach to do the transit. IP based not dark fibre unfortunately. That said, most ISPs won’t escalate when there’s an OR problem, or at least take a long time to, and then the OR tech is usually just trained to test the cable coming in and not a lot else. I used to be with Andrew’s and Arnold (run by @revk…
I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.
It feels so odd (in a good way!) to see people talking about A&A - I recommend them to everyone I know, they’re truly excellent.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.
> via overnight mail In the USA, what is this, precisely?
Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of someone who is not limited by stupid rules.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#278I am reading this and thinking why does it sound familiar. And then only learned Xfinity means Cable / DOCSIS. Edit: I wish the title could be edited as Cable ISP. It is a common problem with DOCSIS! And has been the case since 1.0 era. DO NOT use Cable if you can. It happens when it is over subscribed, as well as other radio interference. Although common cause is over subscription. You may actually try downgrading y…
Yeah, here in the US there are geographically tiny pockets in a few major cities that have actual fiber. Most of the country, including a shocking number of dense urban areas outside the east coast, has zero fiber penetration. Of our two telephone monopolies, one installed fiber for 10 years and quit (the East Coast one), and the other basically never installed fiber to the home. So anyway, outside that lucky group w…
I live in a place that’s rather difficult to serve and I’m just past the range where the full 24 Mbps ADSL2 speed is available so I get 20 Mbps. Once in a while my telco has infrastructure problems, it uses to be common that there would be lightning or power outages and it wouldn’t come back until they did some kind of manual reset, I talked w/ them and the PUC about it and then it seemed like they set it up so it would do an automated reset. The techs tell me if I lived very close to the node they could set me up with much faster VDSL.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> via overnight mail In the USA, what is this, precisely?
FedEx
Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.
Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity. It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.
Mostly because we're pushing the limits of long-range copper to offer currently-standard bandwidth levels, where as fiber is just getting started (you can go to 100Gbit on the same fiber by just swapping the optics at either end).
Also deploying copper is much more expensive than dirt cheap fiber optic