A monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure

I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.

But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ic...

A lot of the Northeast US that was impacted has fairly 'fresh' copper infrastructure in the last 20 years.

... but in reality, yeah. The outdoor plant does not get taken care of well (in general), there's only so many field techs to go around to be able to re-balance an entire RF system and its nodes.

Certainly, there's problems in some part of the network, and getting past level 1 tech support is hard. Physical security is pretty much unlikely. That said, I don't think those boxes are going to take much abuse to open even if they are locked.

if downgrading to docsis 3.0 (or downgrading to 500/700mb) “fixed” your issue, you probably have a 5-1000mhz splitter thats not just a rf splitter but also, a filter and its JUST leaky enough to allow 1002mhz through.

or maybe the modems happy negotiating down to 900mhz.

but maybe not quite enough for 1008-1100+ required by docsis 3.1

there will be anecdotal reports of a 5-1000mhz splitter “working just fine” maybe that ones a REALLY leaky filter thats also allowing 1008mhz.

or also a case of negotiating a lower channel…

gigabit speed and docsis 3.0 are about the threshold for the 5-1000mhz

problems would manifest with docsis 3.1, gigabit speed(maybe) and then almost guaranteed at 1.2 gig service+

this idea of “sensitive channels” is extremely close to nailing it

splitters fail as well. they’ll bleed through AND filter bands theyre not supposed to. but i didnt seize on that or inside wiring for OP because “the neighbor gets it too”

im on a gigabit implementation that has to have +/- 1100mhz , and my own woes uncovered an 800mhz splitter inside a wallplate. it would lock. it would even run at gig somehow. just not very well. its a 5-2500mhz splitter now. a 5-1200mhz would also do (for now)

everyone on your tap should be using multiplexed signals, and you should have a good 300mhz or so to play with and lock onto. but if every single one of you gets kneecapped at +/- 1000mhz, then theres a really congested 100mhz band and another 100-200mhz thats open for everyone but you cant lock on to it.

I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was showing up in advertising on the same road family business is on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site. Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete. Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location went from 300/20 to 300/300.

Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared to buy my own modems. Thankfully it’s been pretty reliable, better than the power utility (especially since comcast will literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in extended outages).

They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing will be done until the move was completed.

Bunch of

UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing

Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times). So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for Xfinity.

Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than his requirements, for one.

Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.

An ISP (like one that starts with the first letter of the alphabet and ends with a common abbreviation for an explosive compound) might not think it’s worth coming out and marking their fiber lines when you call the city’s 811 number to mark utilities before digging for a project, like a fence.

If that fence ends up cutting the fiber line when digging a post, the company installing the fence can submit a ticket through a different portal than you as an actual residential customer of the ISP can, and that ticket probably gets responded to well before your attempts to contact them and request a call back because they are always experiencing a high volume of calls.

They’ll never admit any negligence on their part for refusing to mark utility lines, and you just have to remember where they buried the new ones, if they ever came back out to bury them instead of just leaving them aboive ground and flailing around.

Sometimes they even try to charge you for fixing the fiber line.

I phoned xfinity support who said they’d send a tech out at no cost to me.

The tech comes, finds bad connections in the shared external apartment box, fixes them, leaves without entering my apartment.

Xfinity sends me a support bill for the tech.

I call xfinity support to complain saying they said the tech would be free. The support agent says there’s nothing they can do and also that I should sign up for their support plan to get a 50% discount on the fee.

I tell them to cancel my internet subscription because I won’t support a company with deceptive billing practices. They give me 3 retention offers (the last one being an additional 25% discount on the tech fee). I decline because they told me it would be free. My internet is scheduled to be cancelled.

I go to twitter (as it was called at the time), and @ xfinity support with this same story.

Someone from that Twitter account DMs me and I told them that if they cancel the technician fee, they can leave my internet subscription active.

They do so with exactly no fuss.

I don’t know why, but apparently publicly @‘ing xfinity on Twitter gets you better support than calling them and actually cancelling your internet.

Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith effort to resolve it with them beforehand.

What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they have no reason to bother actually even providing the service. Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money providing you with a service) to it being their problem (they now need to convince you to give them money).

Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden, and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of when you will need to do this again, not if).

Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?