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A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

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Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#341

Post by Marsymars »

driverdan wrote: post #311
icedchai wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had packet loss on my DOCSIS connection for years, on-and-off. The upstream speed would also regularly drop below a megabit. It became a problem for remote work. I complained regularly, and always had "techs" come out. They would usually claim it was my splitter or my modem. I suggested they go outside and test the line from the street. They'd then confirm the loss was present on the line outside, then escalate it…

> Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood. Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.

It's fairly involved in an older neighbourhood if the utilities are buried... they installed it in mine a couple years ago, and it involved months of contractors and trucks in the neighbourhood marking utility right-of-ways and hydrovaccing holes in everyone's front yards.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#342

Post by Marsymars »

op00to wrote: post #197
joezydeco wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days you get a lot better result from any company if you take a few minutes, find the email of a few VPs in the target company, and write the execs directly. Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.

Executive Email Carpet Bombing no longer works well, even with a cogent, calm, clear explanation of the issue and what you want them to do. At best it gets sent to a customer service manager, but in my experience it often gets sent to a black hole.

Half the execs at my company have declared email bankruptcy, and even if you work with them and they're expecting an email from you, you have to follow up in person or text them to tell them to check their email for the email they asked you to send them.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#343

Post by icedchai »

Marsymars wrote: post #341
driverdan wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood. Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.

It's fairly involved in an older neighbourhood if the utilities are buried... they installed it in mine a couple years ago, and it involved months of contractors and trucks in the neighbourhood marking utility right-of-ways and hydrovaccing holes in everyone's front yards.

Yep, it was this exactly. 40+ year old neighborhood with buried electric, gas, water, telco. They had to dig up yards, do horizontal drilling under some roads, etc.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#345

Post by PeterStuer »

Our cable DOCSIS isp in our neighbourhood was down for a whole week. Each day the calls and a tech visit on prem were assuring us "this is a top tier priority outage, we have crews on it 24/7", yet in the neighbourhood, not a technician in sight.

Finally 7 days in a crew showed up in the street measuring each street cabinet. They were able to pinpoint the fault to a house 2 blocks down, where they told us a partial cable cut apparently had signal from their powerline flooding the coax signal. Once they decoupled that premise, signal in the area went back to normal.

We were lucky in that we had a DOCSIS 3.1 that tries to downregulate modulations when cable noise is present, so instead of going to 0 internet for a week like the older DOCSIS installs, our usual 500/30 Mbps still managed 0.1 - 3 Mbps up, so things like mail could still eventually get through.

Now looking into Starlink as a backup, as until they run fiber here, there is little alternative (besides vdsl, which is its own nightmare)

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#346

Post by hydrox24 »

jallonclone wrote: post #267

I have a similar problem with the power company. Every day starting around 2200 (excluding Saturdays and US holidays), there are irregular voltage fluctuations in the 118-124 voltage range, which cause really annoying light flicker and might be damaging my appliances (3 water heaters, 2 microwaves, and an air conditioner all dead in the last 5 years), some of them new. It affects other neighbors and is clearly coming…

I wonder if what you're experiencing is something called "ripple control" (in Australia).

Distribution companies send 10-40V signals through the system at much higher frequencies than the normal 50/60Hz of AC systems (750-1100Hz) to tell old controlled load devices to switch on or off to use cheap nighttime power.

Having said that, if your distribution company has no idea what it is then it makes this less likely.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#347

Post by porridgeraisin »

Nice thing in India is that all the major providers grey-legally put optical fiber everywhere, so you get FTTH or fiber to the street no matter what. In cities where the development authority is competent, it's slower as they actually have to get approvals and stuff. And in some places they use the 26Ghz band (technically part of 5G) for "air fiber" which is basically a wireless link from the roof of an apartment to a nearby line-of-sight base station. It gives good bandwidth as there is no interference with usual mobile data as that band never ended up working in practice without clean LOS.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#348

Post by 7bit »

rmoriz wrote: post #168
7bit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck Vodafone Germany in particular. I had a cable-contract that was rock solid for years until it wasn't. No amount of calls and complaints was able to convince them to do anything. First, it was clearly a problem in the house. Weeks later it suddenly was a regional issue that needed massive infrastructure updates. Then it became a problem caused by a single household creating massive interference, that they need to…

Cable TV is so bad to debug as it is not following a star topology in larger houses. What’s even worse: We have FTTB by the city carrier since 2009 but no efforts have been made to provide FTTH in-house. Recently they started an offer for retrofitting but as every flat is owned by a different party and nobody knows the difference in between FTTB+g.fast and FTTH, I gave up. Boomers and digital naives own our country.

I'm talking about cable Internet. But it probably doesn't change the content of your comment

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#349

Post by ovo101 »

The real problem isn’t just one ISP refusing to fix upstream infrastructure—it’s the structural monopoly that lets them get away with it. When customers have no alternatives, neglect becomes a rational business decision: why spend money on upgrades if churn is impossible? This is exactly why municipal broadband and community ISPs matter. They don’t just compete on price, they compete on accountability. Until regulators or local governments break the monopoly, we’ll keep seeing stories where “upstream” issues linger for years because the provider has no incentive to care.

Re: A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

#350

Post by account42 »

icedchai wrote: post #343
Marsymars wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fairly involved in an older neighbourhood if the utilities are buried... they installed it in mine a couple years ago, and it involved months of contractors and trucks in the neighbourhood marking utility right-of-ways and hydrovaccing holes in everyone's front yards.

Yep, it was this exactly. 40+ year old neighborhood with buried electric, gas, water, telco. They had to dig up yards, do horizontal drilling under some roads, etc.

They just rip up the roads here. And then a couple months later another company does the same for their fiber because we can't have proper shared utilities anymore.
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