I 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 your speed / DOCSIS 2.0 / 3.0 to see if it helps.
Funny enough with G.Fast, had they continue the investment running 1Gbps on telephone cable would have still been better than DOCSIS.
I used to fight this before I got my fibre optic. Even 5G Internet is better than DOCSIS. For people who have never been through this, you will quickly learn the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.
I dont know about US, but in most places on earth Government seems to be ok to mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well. And it seems most property agency refuse to put internet connection speed and types on the property pages. If consumer could easily learn without optical fibre equals shitty property and refuse to buy or rent the land lord will have interest to quickly act upon it.
interesting the article mentions his speeds dropped. I wonder if someone at support knows this but knows there's nothing they can really do to fix the issues?
The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer.
They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3.
Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
I can't speak to the accuracy of the diagnosis, but the claims about NTP are bizarre, and to the best of my knowledge, wrong. There's nothing specific about the times the incidents cluster around that would have anything to do with NTP. It doesn't work like that.
>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).
I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.
Sometimes, the truth can be a letdown. Everyone was hoping it was LLMs all the way down. ;)
I am very fortunate to have two competing ISPs in my area. Verizon Fios, and Optimum Fibre. I have played them against each other. I have had both, over the years. I am currently using Optimum.
Still not especially cheap, but the service is good. The customer service ... not so good (think South Park).
The article itself is also AI generated. Plenty of typical signs for AI.
“Every single outage lasted 124.8 ± 1.3 seconds. That’s not random hardware failure. That’s a timeout value hardcoded into something in Xfinity’s infrastructure.”
I’m getting really tired of the Internet these days.
Certain patterns are much more common in LLM output than in human writing. I'm a journalist and love an em dash, for example, but I've never met/read another journalist that uses them nearly as often as LLMs. Same with the "this isn't just X, it's Y" pattern. When you have multiple of these patterns in every paragraph, it's a pretty clear indicator that the text is AI-generated.
Plus, the author admitted to using AI to write it.
One of the little tics I've noticed that helps weed out and LLM generated text is to CTRL+F and look for the word "therefor" in any of it. LLMs will use the word in a new sentence that isn't the conclusion of any previous sentences or paragraphs. Think like, "Bees are small fuzzy and yellow. Therefor their ability to fly is an astounding achievement." In all of my years of reading I've never seen people use the word that much in common writing, and when they do it's usually as part of a compound sentence. These things really do have their own little set of semantics and dialect that they follow that seems like it's a unique quirk.
I don't think anyone's here to debate the origin of speech patterns these things are using. Feels clear to me at least that the guy you're replying to is uninterested in reading stuff generated by AI, I can't say I disagree with him.
I’m very much uninterested in reading AI generated content. Your assertions seems to be “AIs only write like that because people have been writing like that”, but that’s not a great argument.
It feels like AI has suddenly given a platform for people who previously were unable to properly write blog content. But it immediately feels unoriginal and generic.
I’m just not interested in that type of content and immediately put off by it.
The only reason I mentioned this is because of the comment about Gemini 3 being in the comments.
I’m just really, really tired of all the AI content everywhere nowadays and crave some authenticity.
It just feels like cheap remakes / imitations to of original content.
For the most part LLMs choose "the most common" tokens; so regardless of whether the content was "AI content" or not, maybe you are getting tired of mediocrity.
And of course also that mediocrity has now become so cheap that it is now the overwhelming majority.
LLMs have the tendency to really like comparisons / contrasts between things, which is likely due to the nature of neural networks (eg “Paris - France + Italy” = “Rome”). This is because when representing these concepts as embeddings, they can be computer very straightforward in vector space.
So no, it’s not all due to human language, LLMs do really write content in a specific style.
One recent study also showed something interesting: AIs aren’t very good at recognizing AI generated content either, which is likely related; they’re unaware of these patterns.
Was present, so what? It was 1 in 1 million, now it's 999999999 in 1 million. It is perfectly valid getting really tired of it, in fact, this is exactly what "getting really tired of" means and has always meant.
my internet has been broken for 17 months but you're more upset about me using ai to make my sentences sound professional than about comcast refusing to fix their infrastructure
The problem isn’t that you used AI. The problem is that you want to deny using it to write the content.
If you want to go the route of denying that you use it, at least put in the effort to use one of the humanizer tools which gets rid of the typical AI patterns.
But since you didn’t do that, and at the same time are denying it, you’re digging yourself into a hole for no good reason.
At least, I don’t see the end-goal of denying that you used AI to write the article when it’s so blatantly obvious.
Exactly. If the author says "parts of the article was written by AI", that's probably it, nobody will waste any more time on this because this is what the author has decided to do.
But instead the author seems to hide the fact of using AI under the discussion where some people find it distasteful to use AI. That doesn't help.
You shouldn't lie about your work because that harms society (if you care about us) and society also will punish you (if you care about yourself). If you don't care about yourself or the people around you, then I have no idea why you should care.
I hate this aspect of HN, on other websites I can just block these types of sociopaths/trolls at their first message. But here I end up wasting my time and energy or I'll look bad.
I'm not a data analyst. Almost everything pertaining to data analysis of the log is perplexity labs.
I'm also not a journalist and the article I wrote didn't sound professional and was too long. So I had AI change it to have a professional tone and structure and then edited it.
I'm also not an artist and I had AI generate a picture of a bear reading a newspaper. Then I used krita to remove the background and make it transparent.
I also asked the AI to generate 10 headlines, it gave me this one:
How a monopoly ISP weaponizes support incompetence against technical customers
Calls out systemic issue, appeals to HN's anti-monopoly sentiment
Then I changed it to:
How a monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
Yes I leveraged expertise from three fields outside of my skillset to simplify a task, bounce back ideas, and conclude with a superior end result. It was demonstrably effective and it would have been stupid to spend 4x the effort to receive zero traction.
That’s literally what using an AI to write content is. The fact that you’re not seeing that and are resorting to these kind of ridiculous comments says enough.
Though you did your original message a disservice. Now we are left wondering how forthcoming, honest and friendly you were with that support staff. I'd also try to cheap out if I'd have to deal with a rude and/or dishonest customer. I'm not saying you were, but it's hard for us to know if you throw things at us like "why should I care?" You need to understand that this causes certain reactions.
I personally don't mind at all that you used AI to make your writing more accessible. To the contrary, I think it's a very suitable use of the tool and I would do the same.
But don't you realize what impression you are conveying to the audience here by being so strongy defensive? To the point of lashing out at bystanders like me? That's exactly what makes people wonder how you interacted with the company that you are so strongly (and likely rightfully) criticising.
To answer your question, by "owning up" I meant admitting to using AI for the text after initially denying it. Again, no judgement on my end for having used it. Apologies if my choice of the term implies a judgement to you. That wasn't my intention.
Sorry, but the semantic constructs used in the article, the em-dashes, the use of ± signs that nobody ever uses, the typical bold formatting, the fact that your brother posts AI generated comments on your blog, it’s just too much.
I don’t blame you for it, writing a blog post like this without AI takes days of work. But at least own up to it, instead of now playing innocent that you didn’t lie.
No you didn’t lie, you omitted the part you also used AI to write the copy when confronted.
>frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer
hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm springs.
Thing is, even if the neighbors saw something, they didn't see anything when the cops come knocking because everyone is most likely pissed off as well and happy someone is finally doing something that forces attention.
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.
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.
Contacting the Board of Public Utilities in NJ would have probably been your best bet. By law they need to start addressing issues within a week or so. I had some downed comms cable on my property that they took very seriously after contacting the BPU. Fixed within 2 weeks and the ISP support is local and senior.
ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
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.
> and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
But they do care about their monopoly (if they have a legal one). My approach is now to get the municipal monopoly contract void since they claim my home is "available" but they've been saying that for over four years now. They have the requirement to connect everyone within reasonable time. (note: not in the US but the same issues apply elsewhere as well).
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.
Or send an actual letter in the post to the customer service department. I guess approximately nobody does this nowadays but it works very well for me.
I’m wondering how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable. I have a (expensive!) gigahertz bandwidth scope but I’m not sure what I’d look for on it if I connected it to my cable.
The high capacity of an internet link does not translate directly into high bandwidth signals in the analog domain. The DOCSIS standard includes modulation patterns as high as 32768-QAM which allows 15 bits to be transmitted per symbol change. For 1Gb/s, that means that you only need <70M baud.
The upstream channels are squarely in the HF to VHF range. The downstream channels (which typically require more bandwidth) start at about the same HF frequency (42MHz) but can extend above 1GHz. Each channel, however, is relatively bandwidth limited.
Bet you wished we passed net neutrality and made these monopolies common carriers now don’t you? The moment you saw the state of the junction should have told you everything you need to know and I would do everything to get out of Xfinity. Starlink is a great choice if you don’t have hosting requirements. I empathize because there’s regions in the US that have one 1 provider. You’re kinda screwed.
Worst is Xfinity will do everything to blame it on you including charge you, the customer, for new cable lines and junction box. Rusted out splitters is also common.
I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter’s shitlist to this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to wait for the line to become available again. No amount of technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with their infrastructure.
So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
I recently had to do the same thing with Cox. It’s funny how a customer is responsible for repair fees until the FCC gets involved and all of a sudden they figure out the necessary work outside the house.
One period they were "moving tv totally digitally" and as part of that my node basically ran out of bandwidth 3pm to 9am every day for two months. I lucked out because I was on business and knew my sales person and happened to live near their backup head office in the country but it took a tech driving over refusing to enter my house showing me this on his tablet and me driving to the office at 450pm super mad to finally get one of the engineers.
They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing will be done until the move was completed.
In 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 who surfaces around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your behalf.
If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.
i touched on this in a longer comment in this thread because i think that docsis 3.0
goes up to 900-1002mhz
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.
In my case, one of the main loops had a cable break under a roadway, in a place on the loop that was wholly Comcast infra rather than subscriber. You’re not wrong about the general case! But for that reason, they basically stopped acknowledging the issue to me at all, never followed up on support calls ever again, and it took them maybe three years to close that roadway overnight and fix their cable. (I was able to manifest the issue at a service speed of 125mbps when capacity up to 1+ gbps was available, but of course that low limit didn’t stop the modems from negotiating whatever full-width max-QAM links they could.)
Diagnostics mastery note: logically ruling out a readily testable possibility is only (somewhat) logical when one hasn’t exhausted all other possibilities. Displeasing and successful diagnostic tests that ought not to differentiate but do are how one exposes issues hiding in the blind spots of other experts. (If they hadn’t explicitly said ‘I have no ideas left’ in as many words, I probably wouldn’t have posted at all.) Here is an idea they hadn’t openly said they considered. The reasons this idea might or might not pan out are still interesting to me! TIL! But it was a beautiful and consumer-accessible scalpel of diagnostic and earned me a walkthrough of the signal contamination specifics by the senior truck tech who showed up to help the lesser truck tech, so perhaps it’ll help another.
There was an irregularly but often transmitting radio antenna tower fifty feet from my home, and the outage duration when an outage occurred was precisely the same each time, because Docsis is very carefully specified in how it starts up. (Don’t remember the duration, sorry.) The outage interval varied based on antenna usage; if OP is suffering a similar circuit break, a continuous transmitter nearby could certainly cause continuous outages at the regular interval “renegotiating, success, assigned channel collision” loop.
The outages mostly happened at very specific times during the hour (:29 and :44) for 17 months. It just doesn't add up to being RF interference, especially from a radio tower. But if OP has a radio tower 50 feet from their home, I guess we could consider it.
How did you know when the radio tower was transmitting?
The value here is “triage experiment: try an older modem”. If it reveals something, now they’re not stuck. If it fails in the same way, no knowledge is gained.
According to the article (again), he was using his own Xfinity-approved modem. I doubt his neighbor was also using the same model.
There's no point in performing random experiments if you've already ruled out those causes in some way. It would also require either renting a modem temporarily or buying one.
If that's a ham antenna, go talk to the guy and he might know some tricks for either shielding your connection (doubt that's possible though), pressuring Comcast, or else at least making an effort to avoid frequencies that interfere with your internet.
I did not find provisioning speed to have any effect whatsoever on the channels or encoding negotiated by the multiple modems I swapped into the circuit; whether 50, 125, or 1000mbit. It would be logical to do that; perhaps now they do?
When you need a company like that to do something, figure out what they're afraid of.
The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday, raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen: FCC, local politicians, etc.
You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a single phone call.
That's the problem in my country. They're not afraid of anyone. It's a true duopoly here. There's no FCC to complain to, I guess the most you can do is weasel your way out of your contract but that leaves you with no internet. Local politicians don't give two shits (nor do they have any power). You could switch to a different provider, but their network is either copper (aka low speeds and unstable) or fiber (which is a hollow promise right now - there just isn't any fiber in my area).
I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally fixed it was to upgrade to business-class service, complain to business support, and they sent a tech who eventually found what it was (a tester on the line painted over so as to nearly be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to consumer DSL.
My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier this year, end of contract came up.
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).
I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
The op showed starlink as a comparison. It was one of several 100Mbit options. Comcast is the only service above the 100Mbit level at 1200Mbit advertised .
100Mbit seems fine? I obviously don't have the full picture for what the OP is doing with their line on a day-to-day basis, but, saying that you're entirely out of options when there is an option that is just slower is a little odd
(I do get that Starlink is also quite expensive if it is not your only serious choice)
Starlink service is blacked out if you're within 20 miles of a radiotelescope that uses nearby bands as starlink. Maybe that's considered an edge case, but I can promise you Comcast has a lot of neglected infrastructure in those areas. I have receipts to prove that service dropouts are from outside the demarc but I had to waste a lot of time getting a tech to come out and say "looks fine to me".
Germany/Vodafone: A couple of years ago my DOCSIS connection that worked flawlessly for years started to fail in almost the same pattern. All reporting and support communication went nowhere, had to use the procedure by German IT/Telco regulator to cancel my contract early. It sucked because VDSL is slower but Vodafone wasn’t interested in fixing.
They claim something/someone in the curb is interfering but neither trace it down nor fix it.
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 find.
Months later they went back to infrastructure updates.
After 9 months of this shit I reported the issue to Bundesnetzagentur.
My next call to Vodafone and they "suddenly" offer to reduce my monthly subscription fee. After threatening to call the BNetzA again, they also offered to payback part of the fees of the previous 9 months.
The problem was magically resolved 3 months later. I'm on the reduced monthly fee ever since. They have forgotten to raise it back to normal and I'm not reminding them about it because they have been such assholes about it.
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.
Infrastructure is difficult. I have to run 2 ISPs these days. FTTP and DOCSIS.
The fiber line is obviously my primary and it's completely flawless when it's working. The problem is that about once or twice a year a utility contractor will break the fiber in my neighborhood and it can go out for up to 2 days. Cellular service is not sufficient to cover. The cable connection is what I use when the fiber goes down hard like that. I don't bother with a multi-WAN router or anything. It's a manual cutover thing. The cable can obviously go down too, but it follows a different path (power lines vs buried). The cable is more likely to go out, but it can be resolved more quickly assuming a localized incident.
I was looking at using starlink for backup, but there are caveats with satellite connectivity in the woods.
You need to get someone out there. Just tell them over and over again its an outside wiring problem and demand they dispatch a tech. the tech will have different phone numbers with people that sort of know what they are doing. At least this worked before chat gpt ate the world.
The always caressing hand of the free market and no regulations.
I've been through this multiple times. A lawyer friend of mine told me that in such cases only going through a legal battle would solve the problem but the amount of money and time for the zero return will get no interest of any lawyers.
You'll be out of luck unless yourself are a lawyer or you know someone being affected who is up to this tedious battle
I got a problem with my AT&T Fiber service at the house. We pay for a 500 Mbps plan, and I can get 600 Mbps up and down via ethernet on speedtest (probably due to over provisioning). However, I can only download stuff about 8 MB/s from most places. I believe this to be an internal issue as whenever I connect to any VPN service, I can get the full 600 Mbps. Furthermore, some servers are able to serve me at full speed, but this is rare. Usually GitHub git servers can upload to me at full speed, while GitHub tar balls are uploaded to me at about 8 MB/s.
Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?
At this point escalating, or threatening to, might be the better option. But I can't help trying to figure out how to solve a people/organizational problem with a technological solution.
Github is still famously IPv4 only. I don't know if there is a split between the SSH (if you use SSH to access the repos) and HTTPS (the tarballs) setup on their end, so maybe you get full speed on IPv6 and limited on IPv4 (or the other way around). Try disabling IPv6 on your end, if the speeds match then this might be it. If IPv6 is fast using an IPv4 gateway that tunnels via an IPv6 VPN might be a workaround.
I also had a similar problem a while back. Some speedtests showed more bandwidth than I could get in regular HTTPS downloads. I could get multiple downloads running at the same time that in total added up to the expected speed. In my case the line was just lossy enough (TCP retransmits in Wireshark) for TCP to never scale up its window size properly beyond a certain limit per connection. I verified this by running iperf in TCP and UDP against a gigabit server, UDP reached near full speed because it didn't care about a few lost packages. Working around that issue might be a bit harder, maybe [1] via [2] can provide some ideas to look into.
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.
My first guess wouldn't be routing, but traffic-shaping.
Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN connection is subjected to.
Reminds me of the cable internet I had in college. Every night it would drop for several minutes at a time. My homework included cisco labs using equipment we had to reserve remotely so loosing my SSH connections was maddening.
Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength. Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem went away, they said another tech would come back out and check on it.
One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day to the dismay of the receptionist.
I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building.
But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case).
I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices.
I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times.
My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
You have an option. Starlink. If you are not FPS player you will be really happy. There are service interruption, but they are very rare (at least for me). Just drop single ping here and there.
The periodic resets could also be watchdog timer related (without knowing what level their hardware is running on). Too long of a loop without resetting the timer (in a long loop), then the hardware also gets reset.
Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights which would be on a timer and cause chaos).
This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests.
I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs.
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.
Did he update the post since I commented? I'm sure they weren't there.
I'm pretty convinced it is RF interference. (Nearly) all DOCSIS interference is at node level, it's a shared system so any RF is going to knock out neighbouring properties.
He also could do with pasting the SNR and power levels for each DOCSIS channel :).
Fair enough if the author really needs 1gig, but I think it's pushing to say it's a monopoly based on that. 99% of residential users would not really notice 300mbit starlink vs 1gig (and starlink is likely to reach gig speeds in the next year or so).
I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141’s that stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed ‘upgrade’ that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units same problem. I’m the problem using old modems says reddit. DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more sympathetic, but I still couldn’t get a tech that could do anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183 which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds.
After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service.
And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
Large service providers hate you. Not just you; they hate all humans, especially those that they have to pay or those that cost them money.
They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They literally don’t want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay them in a month.
The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people who can do more than just read a script “did you unplug it and plug it back in?”
Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don’t let things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the local government that you can vote out), and so “bad enough” is pretty bad compared to a place with real competition.
It sucks, but there it is.
Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they just don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.
I've had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample, I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't service it.
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.
There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.
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.
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.
I spent years with DSL because xfinoty was the only option and when I tried to use them tgey tried to charge me to install a compatible modem that had zero requirements except flipping a switch. I walked into their store.
I had to step back for my own sanity when dealing with similar issues with xfinity, had multiple FCC cases open and they just lied their way through it with no impunity.
OP if you're organizing let me know I have a burning fire passion for xfinity to get their just desserts
I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum recently.
have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile?
i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time ..
and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case
after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate.
TLDR:
you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still.
MORE:
OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it).
but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb.
spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters
ANECODTAL:
my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds.
techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment.
TECHNICAL:
i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz
its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter.
its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through.
sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>
I had an old 15+ year old line when I moved in. Helped my neighbor cut a few hundred of his monthly by getting xfinity and they ran a brand new drop for him. Then just recently they "upgraded" my line. But I don't have any splitter or filter its just a connector with a ground that attaches my home cable to the drop cable.
the reason id suggested connecting your modem at the outside drop would also cover any and all inside wiring issues. and that could be anything. frayed end. a nail through it. moisture.
i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 , but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just yesterday:
the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer service “look, i connected at the drop and have the same issue its NOT my inside wiring.”
everything from that point back is their problem and they owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof and go back with it.
in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i unfortunately had some digging to do
its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go ripping open all their wall plates and checking every inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one. unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what needs to be done.
but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it. maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts end faster when they review it.
This seems pretty likely, but shouldn't a tech roll have included sampling the signal strength/snr at these frequencies? Or would the tech tools be likely to be on old frequencies too?
Tech should plug the meter into where the modem is too, though, right? And if the SNR looks good at the dmarc and not at the modem, there's your problem... Tech can peace out if you don't have inside line coverage.
I've had a very similar problem with my cable internet circa 2010. It must have been DOCSIS 3.0. Multiple times a day my connection would stop working completely. The modem's 'connected' and 'carrier up' and 'carrier down' lights were on, and I had LAN communication with the modem, but no data would pass though on the WAN side.
From the management page of the modem (I later learned you weren't supposed to know about) I could see the upstream and downstream carriers were correctly established and still operational, but on the IP (PPPoE) level the TX (upstream) packet counter was increasing, but the RX (downstream) packet counter did not. Releasing the IP on my router (remember, it was PPPoE), then waiting 10 minutes or so before renewing the IP via DHCP would bring connectivity back.
I would call to my ISP (the largest ISP in my country) to try to resolve the issue. Every. Single. Time. I had to explain to the support employee that yes, I did disconnect and reconnect power, yes, my computer's software was up to date, yes, I did try connecting via LAN directly to the modem to eliminate any possible router issues, etc.
Now, at this point in the story I should point out that I held a degree in electrical engineering, specialising in embedded systems and high-speed data transmission and also had just about all Cisco networking certifications. I was more than qualified to design cable modems myself, imagine the frustration wasn't able to fix this issue.
One night I came home to the same problem, called customer service again, fully prepared to do the 'dance' of answering every basic troubleshooting question. But to my surprise, the guy on the phone seemed legit knowledgable. When I described him the symptoms I saw from the modem's management page he was rather surprised that I managed to discover that functionality, but said he knew what the problem would be then.
The support employee was quickly to confirm that someone in my neighbourhood hard-coded his IP-address instead of allowing DHCP (a common trick back in the day to get a static IP on a residential cable connection), and that that IP was clashing with the IP their DHCP would assign to my router's MAC address. He asked me what brand of router I had, and had to explain to him that it was a self-built OpenBSD box. His response was: "great! then you probably know how to spoof the MAC on your WAN interface then?". I did, I changed my MAC to a value he gave me, and immediately my connection came back up. He explained me that any MAC address starting with AB:BA (named after the band) was reserved for a special block of customers with this kind of issue.
We continued chatting a bit about DOCSIS, networking technology, modulation types, OpenBSD (it was also his favourite OS) and much more nerdy stuff. At some point I asked him, respectfully, how someone with his knowledge ended up at the support helpdesk of an ISP. He then told me he was the ISP's CTO, in charge of all network operations, and that he was just manning the helpdesk while his colleagues were on a diner break...
My cable internet was down for 3 weeks after a maintenance, they sent out someone 2 times. We had an irc channel where engineers from most of the countrys isps were in, but not this isp, but then i remember that there was a guy consulting for them. Took him 5 minutes to fix it, it was a problem with my speed profile (increased upload plan) and I was the only one in my area that was on it.
It's way easier than you'd think to start an ISP - at least if you're content to only provide internet to datacenter servers. That's a competitive market. You can buy switches and routers and servers, rent colo space, rent leased lines between DCs, pay for internet access from some upstreams and IXes and sell internet access to others in the same DCs. It's still difficult but it's possible, even for an individual. And you won't make any money on that because it's a competitive market.
The real challenge is then getting that access out to all the surrounding individual homes and businesses. Laying fiber in streets or overhead can be legally difficult and it's also just a ton of physical labour.
If any millionaires or mad scientists are reading this and frustrated with their own internet access, though, please give it a try. There are tons of success stories where someone just created a small ISP to free their small town from an internet monopoly that everyone hated.
Couldn't cell or Starlink substitute in this day and age? 5G cells are pretty prolific now. So even if you might not want to actually leave, it's a perfectly good threat and functions as competition in their eyes.
I tried to leave just a few days ago and use a Mint Mobile Wireless Internet. But then I found that I had to be double-natted and my reverse proxy didn't work so I would have to give up my servers and VPN.
Nope. Usually much slower with higher latency, and CGNAT limits what you can do with your connection. Starlink uses CGNAT and some mobile carriers do as well.
2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems.
your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting.
3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace.
coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized.
nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it.
the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.
Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it.
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
Once an area has its shit in order regulatory-wise: yes. Here my house org will upgrade from 1- to 10-gbit next month, mostly cause it also bumps the wifi generation to the latest and the cost difference was neglible. Previous hardware was end of life , so we had to change stuff regardless.
I 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 your speed / DOCSIS 2.0 / 3.0 to see if it helps.
Funny enough with G.Fast, had they continue the investment running 1Gbps on telephone cable would have still been better than DOCSIS.
I used to fight this before I got my fibre optic. Even 5G Internet is better than DOCSIS. For people who have never been through this, you will quickly learn the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.
I dont know about US, but in most places on earth Government seems to be ok to mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well. And it seems most property agency refuse to put internet connection speed and types on the property pages. If consumer could easily learn without optical fibre equals shitty property and refuse to buy or rent the land lord will have interest to quickly act upon it.
interesting the article mentions his speeds dropped. I wonder if someone at support knows this but knows there's nothing they can really do to fix the issues?
The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer.
They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3.
Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree it's certainly better than one can get from phoning support.
I can't speak to the accuracy of the diagnosis, but the claims about NTP are bizarre, and to the best of my knowledge, wrong. There's nothing specific about the times the incidents cluster around that would have anything to do with NTP. It doesn't work like that.
We're talking about this line, right?
>The precision of outages (at :29 and :44) matches a network-synchronized clock (NTP).
I think this just correctly points out that if the trigger was something unsynchronized like animals chewing on wires or someone digging underground, you wouldn't have 61% of events occurring at these two second markers. Even if the trigger was something digital but on a machine that isn't NTP synchronized, you would eventually have enough clock drift to move the events to other seconds. 61% combined at two markers (exactly 15 seconds apart) strongly suggests synchronized time.
Though, if I was the author the speculation about the restart time would have me breaking out a timer.
Customer support isn't allowed to tell you to attack the box with a hammer. But if they could be totally honest...
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"Instantly"
You can put whatever name you want there when you post a comment. You don't need to have a registered account.
My brother ran the article through gemini and left that comment
Sometimes, the truth can be a letdown. Everyone was hoping it was LLMs all the way down. ;)
I am very fortunate to have two competing ISPs in my area. Verizon Fios, and Optimum Fibre. I have played them against each other. I have had both, over the years. I am currently using Optimum.
Still not especially cheap, but the service is good. The customer service ... not so good (think South Park).
I think it was someone trying to help and being cheeky about it.
The article itself is also AI generated. Plenty of typical signs for AI.
“Every single outage lasted 124.8 ± 1.3 seconds. That’s not random hardware failure. That’s a timeout value hardcoded into something in Xfinity’s infrastructure.”
I’m getting really tired of the Internet these days.
I think this is a lazy criticism that I am _also_ growing tired of.
If LLMs are trained on written information, that pattern of speech was present before they got there. It's a good way to add emphasis.
Certain patterns are much more common in LLM output than in human writing. I'm a journalist and love an em dash, for example, but I've never met/read another journalist that uses them nearly as often as LLMs. Same with the "this isn't just X, it's Y" pattern. When you have multiple of these patterns in every paragraph, it's a pretty clear indicator that the text is AI-generated.
Plus, the author admitted to using AI to write it.
One of the little tics I've noticed that helps weed out and LLM generated text is to CTRL+F and look for the word "therefor" in any of it. LLMs will use the word in a new sentence that isn't the conclusion of any previous sentences or paragraphs. Think like, "Bees are small fuzzy and yellow. Therefor their ability to fly is an astounding achievement." In all of my years of reading I've never seen people use the word that much in common writing, and when they do it's usually as part of a compound sentence. These things really do have their own little set of semantics and dialect that they follow that seems like it's a unique quirk.
Do you mean therefore or therefor? I only ask because I have never seen an AI say therefor. (therefore ~ due to that; therefor ~ for that)
I don't think anyone's here to debate the origin of speech patterns these things are using. Feels clear to me at least that the guy you're replying to is uninterested in reading stuff generated by AI, I can't say I disagree with him.
I’m very much uninterested in reading AI generated content. Your assertions seems to be “AIs only write like that because people have been writing like that”, but that’s not a great argument.
It feels like AI has suddenly given a platform for people who previously were unable to properly write blog content. But it immediately feels unoriginal and generic.
I’m just not interested in that type of content and immediately put off by it.
The only reason I mentioned this is because of the comment about Gemini 3 being in the comments.
I’m just really, really tired of all the AI content everywhere nowadays and crave some authenticity.
It just feels like cheap remakes / imitations to of original content.
For the most part LLMs choose "the most common" tokens; so regardless of whether the content was "AI content" or not, maybe you are getting tired of mediocrity.
And of course also that mediocrity has now become so cheap that it is now the overwhelming majority.
LLMs have the tendency to really like comparisons / contrasts between things, which is likely due to the nature of neural networks (eg “Paris - France + Italy” = “Rome”). This is because when representing these concepts as embeddings, they can be computer very straightforward in vector space.
So no, it’s not all due to human language, LLMs do really write content in a specific style.
One recent study also showed something interesting: AIs aren’t very good at recognizing AI generated content either, which is likely related; they’re unaware of these patterns.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147738802...
Was present, so what? It was 1 in 1 million, now it's 999999999 in 1 million. It is perfectly valid getting really tired of it, in fact, this is exactly what "getting really tired of" means and has always meant.
The internet was never here to stay, it's not getting better, enjoy the last days while you can.
I used AI to analyze the log for patterns and to make the charts.
Pangram says your article is fully AI generated. If you are going this route at least use humanifiers and check the output with popular tools fr
I don't mean to be dismissive or rude, this question is genuine:
Why should I care or bother?
This is the extent to which I used AI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46022576
By "this route" I meant lying about it:
I don't get what you mean by "Why should I care or bother?" in this context, so I assume you misread my comment.my internet has been broken for 17 months but you're more upset about me using ai to make my sentences sound professional than about comcast refusing to fix their infrastructure
Unless you (rncode) are the same person as the article's author (vedmed), nobody has expressed being upset with you.
HN doesn't normally like when people open multiple accounts. Yours is 17 hours old. (Two facts that I won't comment on further.)
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The problem isn’t that you used AI. The problem is that you want to deny using it to write the content.
If you want to go the route of denying that you use it, at least put in the effort to use one of the humanizer tools which gets rid of the typical AI patterns.
But since you didn’t do that, and at the same time are denying it, you’re digging yourself into a hole for no good reason.
At least, I don’t see the end-goal of denying that you used AI to write the article when it’s so blatantly obvious.
Exactly. If the author says "parts of the article was written by AI", that's probably it, nobody will waste any more time on this because this is what the author has decided to do.
But instead the author seems to hide the fact of using AI under the discussion where some people find it distasteful to use AI. That doesn't help.
You are the one with the problem, not me.
I suggest you reread, I am very transparent about how I used AI in the very thread to which you are replying claiming that I am denying using AI.
You’re not being transparent. When I called you out on using AI for writing the copy, you responded with:
“I used AI to analyze the log for patterns and to make the charts.”
Which is very, very much suggesting you only used AI for that.
Later, you admitted you used AI to rewrite your article.
That’s not being very transparent at all.
You shouldn't lie about your work because that harms society (if you care about us) and society also will punish you (if you care about yourself). If you don't care about yourself or the people around you, then I have no idea why you should care.
I hate this aspect of HN, on other websites I can just block these types of sociopaths/trolls at their first message. But here I end up wasting my time and energy or I'll look bad.
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You do you, but the least you can do is either not reply, or admit that you used AI to write the copy as well.
I'm not a data analyst. Almost everything pertaining to data analysis of the log is perplexity labs.
I'm also not a journalist and the article I wrote didn't sound professional and was too long. So I had AI change it to have a professional tone and structure and then edited it.
I'm also not an artist and I had AI generate a picture of a bear reading a newspaper. Then I used krita to remove the background and make it transparent.
I also asked the AI to generate 10 headlines, it gave me this one:
How a monopoly ISP weaponizes support incompetence against technical customers
Then I changed it to:How a monopoly ISP refuses to fix upstream infrastructure
Yes I leveraged expertise from three fields outside of my skillset to simplify a task, bounce back ideas, and conclude with a superior end result. It was demonstrably effective and it would have been stupid to spend 4x the effort to receive zero traction.
I don’t blame people for using it. But at least own up to it when being called out.
You now admit that you indeed have AI “convert it to a more professional tone and edit it”.
Next time have the decency to admit that immediately when called out rather than saying you only used it for analyzing the logs.
Do you want me to prostrate before you for using AI? Get real. I told you exactly how I used it.
And no AI did not write the article. I wrote it. Then I instructed AI to restructure it to have a professional tone.
That’s literally what using an AI to write content is. The fact that you’re not seeing that and are resorting to these kind of ridiculous comments says enough.
AI did write the article; you wrote the prompt to the AI.
If his admissions are true. your statement is more misleading than his. He wrote it. AI edited it. Right?
Thanks for owning up.
Though you did your original message a disservice. Now we are left wondering how forthcoming, honest and friendly you were with that support staff. I'd also try to cheap out if I'd have to deal with a rude and/or dishonest customer. I'm not saying you were, but it's hard for us to know if you throw things at us like "why should I care?" You need to understand that this causes certain reactions.
What do you mean "owning up"?
You're interjecting your own moral paradigm.
Are you going to ask a car mechanic to own up to using an impact driver? Or a contractor to own up to using an electric nail gun?
I successfully concluded a task beyond expectations. You just don't like it how I did it.
I personally don't mind at all that you used AI to make your writing more accessible. To the contrary, I think it's a very suitable use of the tool and I would do the same.
But don't you realize what impression you are conveying to the audience here by being so strongy defensive? To the point of lashing out at bystanders like me? That's exactly what makes people wonder how you interacted with the company that you are so strongly (and likely rightfully) criticising.
To answer your question, by "owning up" I meant admitting to using AI for the text after initially denying it. Again, no judgement on my end for having used it. Apologies if my choice of the term implies a judgement to you. That wasn't my intention.
Why is this downvoted? It's AI slop, and the submitter lied about it (admitted later). It's okay to call out that behaviour
I lied?
AI did not generate the article. You are the one lying.
AI rewrote and restructured an article I wrote to have a professional tone.
In your comments you’re specifically avoiding answering the question, until you finally admitted to using AI to make your tone more “professional”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46022576
Sorry, but the semantic constructs used in the article, the em-dashes, the use of ± signs that nobody ever uses, the typical bold formatting, the fact that your brother posts AI generated comments on your blog, it’s just too much.
I don’t blame you for it, writing a blog post like this without AI takes days of work. But at least own up to it, instead of now playing innocent that you didn’t lie.
No you didn’t lie, you omitted the part you also used AI to write the copy when confronted.
[flagged]
You don’t owe me anything, but you’re being dishonest and that deserves being called out.
Now we’re left wondering whether you were dishonest in the content of your article as well.
I have to admit I am also tired, and your quote sounds like a competent engineer doing a flex, and also being a bit bitter.
on edit: regarding the comment, yeah that sounds pretty AI.
I'm also getting tired of the people getting tired of the people getting tired of AI
Marketing is very excited about the negative articles.
These days it could also be a human being who has been talking with AI. People pick up the lingo of the <people> they're talking with.
you've obviously never used AI much then, because I was able to instantly tell that it's a summarisation typical of claude/gemini/copilot
Damned if you do, more damned if you don't.
I do suggest using high voltage rather than a hammer.
>frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer
hmmmm i think i just saw that guy at the motel 6 in palm springs.
Did the neighbor get in trouble or was this a mom-stealing-baby-food-and-diapers kind of witnessing?
Or was it "the neighbor" in the same way that "my friend" has a weed hookup?
That's a felony in the US by the way, and most will prosecute if they have enough evidence of who it was.
Thing is, even if the neighbors saw something, they didn't see anything when the cops come knocking because everyone is most likely pissed off as well and happy someone is finally doing something that forces attention.
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
Years ago I lived in an apartment with intermittent connection issues.
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.
Contacting the Board of Public Utilities in NJ would have probably been your best bet. By law they need to start addressing issues within a week or so. I had some downed comms cable on my property that they took very seriously after contacting the BPU. Fixed within 2 weeks and the ISP support is local and senior.
ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
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.
> and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
But they do care about their monopoly (if they have a legal one). My approach is now to get the municipal monopoly contract void since they claim my home is "available" but they've been saying that for over four years now. They have the requirement to connect everyone within reasonable time. (note: not in the US but the same issues apply elsewhere as well).
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.
Or send an actual letter in the post to the customer service department. I guess approximately nobody does this nowadays but it works very well for me.
This reminds me exactly of "The Art of Turboing"[1]
[1] https://www.macwhiz.com/blog/art-of-turboing/
I’m wondering how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable. I have a (expensive!) gigahertz bandwidth scope but I’m not sure what I’d look for on it if I connected it to my cable.
The high capacity of an internet link does not translate directly into high bandwidth signals in the analog domain. The DOCSIS standard includes modulation patterns as high as 32768-QAM which allows 15 bits to be transmitted per symbol change. For 1Gb/s, that means that you only need <70M baud.
The upstream channels are squarely in the HF to VHF range. The downstream channels (which typically require more bandwidth) start at about the same HF frequency (42MHz) but can extend above 1GHz. Each channel, however, is relatively bandwidth limited.
Bet you wished we passed net neutrality and made these monopolies common carriers now don’t you? The moment you saw the state of the junction should have told you everything you need to know and I would do everything to get out of Xfinity. Starlink is a great choice if you don’t have hosting requirements. I empathize because there’s regions in the US that have one 1 provider. You’re kinda screwed.
Worst is Xfinity will do everything to blame it on you including charge you, the customer, for new cable lines and junction box. Rusted out splitters is also common.
I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter’s shitlist to this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to wait for the line to become available again. No amount of technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with their infrastructure.
So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
I recently had to do the same thing with Cox. It’s funny how a customer is responsible for repair fees until the FCC gets involved and all of a sudden they figure out the necessary work outside the house.
One period they were "moving tv totally digitally" and as part of that my node basically ran out of bandwidth 3pm to 9am every day for two months. I lucked out because I was on business and knew my sales person and happened to live near their backup head office in the country but it took a tech driving over refusing to enter my house showing me this on his tablet and me driving to the office at 450pm super mad to finally get one of the engineers.
They basically refunded 3 months and said good luck nothing will be done until the move was completed.
In 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 who surfaces around these parts sometimes!) who were fantastic, because while expensive, the first person who answered the phone understood your summary, trusted you, and would happily beat up OR on your behalf.
I still use Andrews & Arnold. Absolutely fantastic service.
If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.
i touched on this in a longer comment in this thread because i think that docsis 3.0 goes up to 900-1002mhz
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.
In my case, one of the main loops had a cable break under a roadway, in a place on the loop that was wholly Comcast infra rather than subscriber. You’re not wrong about the general case! But for that reason, they basically stopped acknowledging the issue to me at all, never followed up on support calls ever again, and it took them maybe three years to close that roadway overnight and fix their cable. (I was able to manifest the issue at a service speed of 125mbps when capacity up to 1+ gbps was available, but of course that low limit didn’t stop the modems from negotiating whatever full-width max-QAM links they could.)
Diagnostics mastery note: logically ruling out a readily testable possibility is only (somewhat) logical when one hasn’t exhausted all other possibilities. Displeasing and successful diagnostic tests that ought not to differentiate but do are how one exposes issues hiding in the blind spots of other experts. (If they hadn’t explicitly said ‘I have no ideas left’ in as many words, I probably wouldn’t have posted at all.) Here is an idea they hadn’t openly said they considered. The reasons this idea might or might not pan out are still interesting to me! TIL! But it was a beautiful and consumer-accessible scalpel of diagnostic and earned me a walkthrough of the signal contamination specifics by the senior truck tech who showed up to help the lesser truck tech, so perhaps it’ll help another.
According to the article, it happens on a very specific set of intervals. That's not an RF issue. Downgrading/replacing the device isn't a solution.
There was an irregularly but often transmitting radio antenna tower fifty feet from my home, and the outage duration when an outage occurred was precisely the same each time, because Docsis is very carefully specified in how it starts up. (Don’t remember the duration, sorry.) The outage interval varied based on antenna usage; if OP is suffering a similar circuit break, a continuous transmitter nearby could certainly cause continuous outages at the regular interval “renegotiating, success, assigned channel collision” loop.
The outages mostly happened at very specific times during the hour (:29 and :44) for 17 months. It just doesn't add up to being RF interference, especially from a radio tower. But if OP has a radio tower 50 feet from their home, I guess we could consider it.
How did you know when the radio tower was transmitting?
The value here is “triage experiment: try an older modem”. If it reveals something, now they’re not stuck. If it fails in the same way, no knowledge is gained.
According to the article (again), he was using his own Xfinity-approved modem. I doubt his neighbor was also using the same model.
There's no point in performing random experiments if you've already ruled out those causes in some way. It would also require either renting a modem temporarily or buying one.
If that's a ham antenna, go talk to the guy and he might know some tricks for either shielding your connection (doubt that's possible though), pressuring Comcast, or else at least making an effort to avoid frequencies that interfere with your internet.
I think that's probably why they downgraded his speed from 1200 to 700, in an attempt to avoid using the more sensitive channels.
I did not find provisioning speed to have any effect whatsoever on the channels or encoding negotiated by the multiple modems I swapped into the circuit; whether 50, 125, or 1000mbit. It would be logical to do that; perhaps now they do?
When you need a company like that to do something, figure out what they're afraid of.
The only thing monopolies like these are afraid of is the government. So if you want them to get off their asses yesterday, raise a stink with whatever arm of your government will listen: FCC, local politicians, etc.
You would not believe how fast even the lowest level government workers can get these guys to take care of your problem with a single phone call.
That's the problem in my country. They're not afraid of anyone. It's a true duopoly here. There's no FCC to complain to, I guess the most you can do is weasel your way out of your contract but that leaves you with no internet. Local politicians don't give two shits (nor do they have any power). You could switch to a different provider, but their network is either copper (aka low speeds and unstable) or fiber (which is a hollow promise right now - there just isn't any fiber in my area).
They fear juries (jurors, really).
I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally fixed it was to upgrade to business-class service, complain to business support, and they sent a tech who eventually found what it was (a tester on the line painted over so as to nearly be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to consumer DSL.
My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier this year, end of contract came up.
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).
I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
Makes me wonder if Starlink is an option for OP. It's more expensive than most ISPs, but probably less than 3x what most people pay.
The op showed starlink as a comparison. It was one of several 100Mbit options. Comcast is the only service above the 100Mbit level at 1200Mbit advertised .
100Mbit seems fine? I obviously don't have the full picture for what the OP is doing with their line on a day-to-day basis, but, saying that you're entirely out of options when there is an option that is just slower is a little odd
(I do get that Starlink is also quite expensive if it is not your only serious choice)
Starlink service is blacked out if you're within 20 miles of a radiotelescope that uses nearby bands as starlink. Maybe that's considered an edge case, but I can promise you Comcast has a lot of neglected infrastructure in those areas. I have receipts to prove that service dropouts are from outside the demarc but I had to waste a lot of time getting a tech to come out and say "looks fine to me".
Germany/Vodafone: A couple of years ago my DOCSIS connection that worked flawlessly for years started to fail in almost the same pattern. All reporting and support communication went nowhere, had to use the procedure by German IT/Telco regulator to cancel my contract early. It sucked because VDSL is slower but Vodafone wasn’t interested in fixing.
They claim something/someone in the curb is interfering but neither trace it down nor fix it.
I don't call Vodafone Würgdafone for no reason lol.
When on a business contract it's ok, but private contracts? Oh hell have they been plagued with scandals.
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 find.
Months later they went back to infrastructure updates.
After 9 months of this shit I reported the issue to Bundesnetzagentur.
My next call to Vodafone and they "suddenly" offer to reduce my monthly subscription fee. After threatening to call the BNetzA again, they also offered to payback part of the fees of the previous 9 months.
The problem was magically resolved 3 months later. I'm on the reduced monthly fee ever since. They have forgotten to raise it back to normal and I'm not reminding them about it because they have been such assholes about it.
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.
Infrastructure is difficult. I have to run 2 ISPs these days. FTTP and DOCSIS.
The fiber line is obviously my primary and it's completely flawless when it's working. The problem is that about once or twice a year a utility contractor will break the fiber in my neighborhood and it can go out for up to 2 days. Cellular service is not sufficient to cover. The cable connection is what I use when the fiber goes down hard like that. I don't bother with a multi-WAN router or anything. It's a manual cutover thing. The cable can obviously go down too, but it follows a different path (power lines vs buried). The cable is more likely to go out, but it can be resolved more quickly assuming a localized incident.
I was looking at using starlink for backup, but there are caveats with satellite connectivity in the woods.
You need to get someone out there. Just tell them over and over again its an outside wiring problem and demand they dispatch a tech. the tech will have different phone numbers with people that sort of know what they are doing. At least this worked before chat gpt ate the world.
Sounds to me like they already had at least three on-site visits by technicians.
The always caressing hand of the free market and no regulations.
I've been through this multiple times. A lawyer friend of mine told me that in such cases only going through a legal battle would solve the problem but the amount of money and time for the zero return will get no interest of any lawyers.
You'll be out of luck unless yourself are a lawyer or you know someone being affected who is up to this tedious battle
I got a problem with my AT&T Fiber service at the house. We pay for a 500 Mbps plan, and I can get 600 Mbps up and down via ethernet on speedtest (probably due to over provisioning). However, I can only download stuff about 8 MB/s from most places. I believe this to be an internal issue as whenever I connect to any VPN service, I can get the full 600 Mbps. Furthermore, some servers are able to serve me at full speed, but this is rare. Usually GitHub git servers can upload to me at full speed, while GitHub tar balls are uploaded to me at about 8 MB/s.
Seeing as everyone in here has a lot of bad experiences with ISPs, should I straight up skip attempting to talk with them at all and go for an FCC complaint/government complaint?
At this point escalating, or threatening to, might be the better option. But I can't help trying to figure out how to solve a people/organizational problem with a technological solution.
Github is still famously IPv4 only. I don't know if there is a split between the SSH (if you use SSH to access the repos) and HTTPS (the tarballs) setup on their end, so maybe you get full speed on IPv6 and limited on IPv4 (or the other way around). Try disabling IPv6 on your end, if the speeds match then this might be it. If IPv6 is fast using an IPv4 gateway that tunnels via an IPv6 VPN might be a workaround.
I also had a similar problem a while back. Some speedtests showed more bandwidth than I could get in regular HTTPS downloads. I could get multiple downloads running at the same time that in total added up to the expected speed. In my case the line was just lossy enough (TCP retransmits in Wireshark) for TCP to never scale up its window size properly beyond a certain limit per connection. I verified this by running iperf in TCP and UDP against a gigabit server, UDP reached near full speed because it didn't care about a few lost packages. Working around that issue might be a bit harder, maybe [1] via [2] can provide some ideas to look into.
[1] https://github.com/apernet/tcp-brutal
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38164574
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.
My first guess wouldn't be routing, but traffic-shaping.
Perhaps the VPN you use is on a protocol/port that isn't outright rate-limited and since ATT can't peak inside your tunnel to see what you are doing with the bandwidth, it avoids any QoS/shaping/limiting that your non-VPN connection is subjected to.
Reminds me of the cable internet I had in college. Every night it would drop for several minutes at a time. My homework included cisco labs using equipment we had to reserve remotely so loosing my SSH connections was maddening.
Numerous phone calls and technician visits. At some point was logging into the cable modem to measure the signal strength. Eventually a tech moved my coax connection at the drop? Problem went away, they said another tech would come back out and check on it.
One week later outages again. Lucky for me they offered one month money back guarantee. I returned that modem on the very last day to the dismay of the receptionist.
I had this same daily connection disruption problem with Xfinity on the east coast, on two different lines in the same building.
But, one difference is that the two lines would fail at different times, not at the exact same time (so not the cause guessed by Gemini, in my case).
I always assumed it was Comcast automating downtime to prevent anyone using the lines for business without paying Comcast Business prices.
I had the two locations connected by fiber and used multi WAN for both load balancing and failover, so the combined uptime was basically 100% because each line was down many times per day, but they were always down at different, non-overlapping times.
My guess is that this failure mode is quite common, whether or not it's intentional. I would love to see this be something a lot of us here can coordinate on jointly pushing Comcast to solve!
The US gov't broke up AT&T and killed Bell Labs for this, so at least they owe us to bust this monopoly
You have an option. Starlink. If you are not FPS player you will be really happy. There are service interruption, but they are very rare (at least for me). Just drop single ping here and there.
The periodic resets could also be watchdog timer related (without knowing what level their hardware is running on). Too long of a loop without resetting the timer (in a long loop), then the hardware also gets reset.
I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I had a similar issue with WOW.
Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights which would be on a timer and cause chaos).
This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests.
Also, why wouldn't starlink be an alternative?
I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs.
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.
Did he update the post since I commented? I'm sure they weren't there.
I'm pretty convinced it is RF interference. (Nearly) all DOCSIS interference is at node level, it's a shared system so any RF is going to knock out neighbouring properties.
He also could do with pasting the SNR and power levels for each DOCSIS channel :).
Fair enough if the author really needs 1gig, but I think it's pushing to say it's a monopoly based on that. 99% of residential users would not really notice 300mbit starlink vs 1gig (and starlink is likely to reach gig speeds in the next year or so).
The author explains in the article they’re looking for gigabit service and Comcast is the only player in the area.
>Everyone downstream of whatever is broken on their infrastructure probably has it too.
Probably?
Being careful not to make claims I can't prove.
I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141’s that stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed ‘upgrade’ that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units same problem. I’m the problem using old modems says reddit. DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more sympathetic, but I still couldn’t get a tech that could do anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183 which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds.
After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service.
And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
Another example why monopolies are bad.
Large service providers hate you. Not just you; they hate all humans, especially those that they have to pay or those that cost them money.
They want you to pay them money and leave them alone. They literally don’t want to talk to you; the cost of the CS rep means that a call from you likely offsets most of all of what you pay them in a month.
The last thing they are going to do is hire more expensive people who can do more than just read a script “did you unplug it and plug it back in?”
Besides, they have very sensitive algorithms that don’t let things get bad enough that they risk losing customers. The algorithms understand their monopoly in your area (granted by the local government that you can vote out), and so “bad enough” is pretty bad compared to a place with real competition.
It sucks, but there it is.
Btw I had a similar situation with an ISP once; I literally sent them a traceroute showing a routing loop in their infra; they just don’t know how to deal with that kind of thing.
I'm with you. They should all be prosecuted the hell out of
I'd start my own ISP for the area
It's possible if you have the startup cash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906
Sue them.
I probably will but my monetary loss is so negligible they wont care.
There's another article on that site about how I sued Subaru of America for covering up an octane issue.
This has to be the weirdest post I've seen in a while? Cable infrastructure in the US is awful. I can't imagine a scenario where it would be reliable.
Yeah its pretty weird I created a website just to write this article just so I could make this post. I'm so frustrated with these outages :(
I've had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample, I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't service it.
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.
There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.
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.
I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.
Easy.
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.
I spent years with DSL because xfinoty was the only option and when I tried to use them tgey tried to charge me to install a compatible modem that had zero requirements except flipping a switch. I walked into their store.
I had to step back for my own sanity when dealing with similar issues with xfinity, had multiple FCC cases open and they just lied their way through it with no impunity.
OP if you're organizing let me know I have a burning fire passion for xfinity to get their just desserts
Do you have any ideas on how to leverage such organization to effectuate change?
It would sure be great to have internet classified as a public utility.
Start by never voting for deregulation
I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
Hey thanks I didn't realize I could do that. Updated the article with the docsis log.
Bunch of
UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing
What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
gotta ask, just because i went through this with spectrum recently.
have you grabbed an extension cord and tried connecting the modem outside at the drop for awhile?
i hear you that your neighbor has the same issue. but if youre in. say a development by the same builder, or were all part of a comcast upgrade at roughly the same time ..
and well… you both recently upgraded to 1.2(?) because that would be the latter case
after my gig upgrade and a few tech visits i ended up finding a splitter that only goes up to 800mhz or so (if that) inside a wallplate.
TLDR:
you might have a 5-1000mhz splitter. thats widely used by comcast still.
MORE:
OFDM is 1008mhz or so and you wouldnt notice the problem under, or maybe just UP TO gigabyte speeds (eg: downgrading to 500mb might mysteriously “fix” it).
but you WILL notice this at 1.2gb.
spectrum is future proofing and using 5-2500mhz splitters
ANECODTAL:
my modem locked with the 800mhz splitter, but it dropped , cycled and had horrible upload speeds.
techs never tried or thought of this . the final boss tech took photos and even took the splitter back to show his boss. i guess multiple units had tickets after the gig upgrade and they had an “aha” moment.
TECHNICAL:
i would expect something more like multiplexing errors in this situation. forgive me because im 20 years out of the game (was an RF/install tech on analog CATV , and cable modems when those were brand new to Charter) and had to look it up but i think docsis 3.1 is dependent on 957–1151 MHz or 1008–1152 MHz
its that 1008+mhz where now your splitter is acting like a 5-1000mhz filter.
its not perfect like okay maybe 4-1003mhz gets through the filter maybe even more permissive if its a cheap one. but thats NOT a clean signal for that frequency band its more like bleed-through.
sort of similar to traps (the little barrels theyd screw onto your line to block you from getting pay channels in the olden days) and how you STILL could sort of see and hear. a little bit of what was going on on cinemax at 3am and at least get the IDEA. :>
I had an old 15+ year old line when I moved in. Helped my neighbor cut a few hundred of his monthly by getting xfinity and they ran a brand new drop for him. Then just recently they "upgraded" my line. But I don't have any splitter or filter its just a connector with a ground that attaches my home cable to the drop cable.
the reason id suggested connecting your modem at the outside drop would also cover any and all inside wiring issues. and that could be anything. frayed end. a nail through it. moisture.
i think my inside wiring was done no earlier than 1991 , but maybe redone once since then and it looked pretty good but i found this on the back of a wallplate , just yesterday:
https://ibb.co/5XjkJ57J
- expires in 6 months
the easiest thing to do is check it at the box and then if nothing else thats ammo for dealing with customer service “look, i connected at the drop and have the same issue its NOT my inside wiring.”
everything from that point back is their problem and they owe you bill credits until its fixed, so get the proof and go back with it.
in my case my modem worked perfectly at the drop :D so i unfortunately had some digging to do
its not practical to suggest someone on the internet go ripping open all their wall plates and checking every inch of inside wire or maybe even running a new one. unless it passes the drop test, and then yeah, thats what needs to be done.
but plugging into the drop will 100% prove whose problem this is. youre california so thats also good ammo for a PUC complaint, that you did that and proved its not your inside wiring and now theyre refusing to deal with it. maybe that will get it to the right person on comcasts end faster when they review it.
This seems pretty likely, but shouldn't a tech roll have included sampling the signal strength/snr at these frequencies? Or would the tech tools be likely to be on old frequencies too?
the SNR and the lock would be perfect at the drop using tech meter.
or, plugging your modem into your dmarc/outside box for a little bit would also confirm or deny this
Tech should plug the meter into where the modem is too, though, right? And if the SNR looks good at the dmarc and not at the modem, there's your problem... Tech can peace out if you don't have inside line coverage.
Story time!
I've had a very similar problem with my cable internet circa 2010. It must have been DOCSIS 3.0. Multiple times a day my connection would stop working completely. The modem's 'connected' and 'carrier up' and 'carrier down' lights were on, and I had LAN communication with the modem, but no data would pass though on the WAN side.
From the management page of the modem (I later learned you weren't supposed to know about) I could see the upstream and downstream carriers were correctly established and still operational, but on the IP (PPPoE) level the TX (upstream) packet counter was increasing, but the RX (downstream) packet counter did not. Releasing the IP on my router (remember, it was PPPoE), then waiting 10 minutes or so before renewing the IP via DHCP would bring connectivity back.
I would call to my ISP (the largest ISP in my country) to try to resolve the issue. Every. Single. Time. I had to explain to the support employee that yes, I did disconnect and reconnect power, yes, my computer's software was up to date, yes, I did try connecting via LAN directly to the modem to eliminate any possible router issues, etc.
Now, at this point in the story I should point out that I held a degree in electrical engineering, specialising in embedded systems and high-speed data transmission and also had just about all Cisco networking certifications. I was more than qualified to design cable modems myself, imagine the frustration wasn't able to fix this issue.
One night I came home to the same problem, called customer service again, fully prepared to do the 'dance' of answering every basic troubleshooting question. But to my surprise, the guy on the phone seemed legit knowledgable. When I described him the symptoms I saw from the modem's management page he was rather surprised that I managed to discover that functionality, but said he knew what the problem would be then.
The support employee was quickly to confirm that someone in my neighbourhood hard-coded his IP-address instead of allowing DHCP (a common trick back in the day to get a static IP on a residential cable connection), and that that IP was clashing with the IP their DHCP would assign to my router's MAC address. He asked me what brand of router I had, and had to explain to him that it was a self-built OpenBSD box. His response was: "great! then you probably know how to spoof the MAC on your WAN interface then?". I did, I changed my MAC to a value he gave me, and immediately my connection came back up. He explained me that any MAC address starting with AB:BA (named after the band) was reserved for a special block of customers with this kind of issue.
We continued chatting a bit about DOCSIS, networking technology, modulation types, OpenBSD (it was also his favourite OS) and much more nerdy stuff. At some point I asked him, respectfully, how someone with his knowledge ended up at the support helpdesk of an ISP. He then told me he was the ISP's CTO, in charge of all network operations, and that he was just manning the helpdesk while his colleagues were on a diner break...
My cable internet was down for 3 weeks after a maintenance, they sent out someone 2 times. We had an irc channel where engineers from most of the countrys isps were in, but not this isp, but then i remember that there was a guy consulting for them. Took him 5 minutes to fix it, it was a problem with my speed profile (increased upload plan) and I was the only one in my area that was on it.
> I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to care less.
Maybe they were doing this?
https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8
Not this bad of a situation but I’ve successfully gotten them to escalate to the network engineers who were able to help
Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact with a network engineer would be helpful
Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve your issue
It's way easier than you'd think to start an ISP - at least if you're content to only provide internet to datacenter servers. That's a competitive market. You can buy switches and routers and servers, rent colo space, rent leased lines between DCs, pay for internet access from some upstreams and IXes and sell internet access to others in the same DCs. It's still difficult but it's possible, even for an individual. And you won't make any money on that because it's a competitive market.
The real challenge is then getting that access out to all the surrounding individual homes and businesses. Laying fiber in streets or overhead can be legally difficult and it's also just a ton of physical labour.
If any millionaires or mad scientists are reading this and frustrated with their own internet access, though, please give it a try. There are tons of success stories where someone just created a small ISP to free their small town from an internet monopoly that everyone hated.
Name and shame!!! Charter, Cox, Comcast... all are ridiculously user-hostile.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Couldn't cell or Starlink substitute in this day and age? 5G cells are pretty prolific now. So even if you might not want to actually leave, it's a perfectly good threat and functions as competition in their eyes.
I tried to leave just a few days ago and use a Mint Mobile Wireless Internet. But then I found that I had to be double-natted and my reverse proxy didn't work so I would have to give up my servers and VPN.
Nope. Usually much slower with higher latency, and CGNAT limits what you can do with your connection. Starlink uses CGNAT and some mobile carriers do as well.
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1. get a starlink.
2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems.
your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting.
3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace.
coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized.
nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it.
the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.
1. Starlink is not an alternative for 1Gbps cable. It's slower with higher latency. It uses CGNAT which limits what you can do with it.
2. Can you provide a source for that?
3. According to the article, the neighbor has the same issue with the same timing. So it's not the modem or inside wiring.
> Xfinity is the only gigabit provider in this area. No competition. No alternatives. I can’t leave. So they don’t have to care.
many such cases...
"only gigabit provider". Like those grow on trees. Lots of people would love to have a fraction of that speed.
Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it.
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
Once an area has its shit in order regulatory-wise: yes. Here my house org will upgrade from 1- to 10-gbit next month, mostly cause it also bumps the wifi generation to the latest and the cost difference was neglible. Previous hardware was end of life , so we had to change stuff regardless.
Shut up, 1gbps up/down in 2025 should be a basic human right.
I can't believe the things you learned to justify in US
You are absolutely right. There should be zero tolerance towards ISPs that provide anything less than one gigabit per second.
This but unironically.
everybody has a fraction of that speed