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.
Twitter support escalation worked in the mid 2010s, but basically now the only effective escalation is to send a letter via overnight mail to the CEO office. This has worked for me for major ISPs, cell phone companies, furniture retailers, hell - even the government after some vital records I asked to get duplicates of came unreadable 5 times in a row.
I inherited this trick from my father who had probably used it since the 1950s. It can work wonders. Except Cash App who closed my account for "contacting employees outside of the support chain."
Priority or Express mail. FedEx or UPS can also send documents. The idea is to bypass the normal mail room as much as possible and to get the thing on the desk of someone who is not limited by stupid rules.
Which is particularly effective in this day and age when many businesses don’t handle a lot of incoming physics mail —- send a FedEx to a particular individual at a particular location and it is not like they have a ‘mailroom’ that handles this routinely, it is a non-routine event that somebody shows up at the front desk to deliver something and inherently memorable.
I had issues too that they sent a tech support out for while warning me "If they find it's your fault, you will be assessed a charge". The tech came out, climbed my local pole and then went down the street and climbed another one. He said it was a busted port and he moved me to a new one, and put in a service request to upgrade as it was out of ports.
CenturyLink sends me a bill for maintenance. After tons of back and forth I got to the point where I said "So can you state for the record since I'm recording this phone call, that I the customer should have climbed the telephone pole to remedy the issue".
After that he finally decides to get in touch with the fiber contractor they use who emphasized it was no fault of my own and they cleared the charge.
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).
>ISPs also have different levels of service for different entities, and seem to just barely care about you as a customer.
Hah, we were independent and now part of a megacorp. The local ISP (basically a Optimum subsidiary) still does not care. Their ONT is still a old model that uses....volatile RAM for configuration, and if (and they do) fail to replace the backup batteries, then the configuration is wiped on power interruptions.
Yea, seriously. These riddles to avoid naming companies are so bizarre. Why do people do this? Does OP really think the AT&T thug squad is going to come to his house to break his kneecaps because he posted about them on HN?
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.
> how you used an oscilloscope to diagnose the ~1ghz bandwidth DOCSIS signals on broadband cable
I should clarify that I didn't really do any _true_ diagnostic with the scope. Simply as an attempt to gather as much data as possible, I connected the oscilloscope to see what the signals looked like. And, because, why not. I had driven 2+ hours to get there, might as well try everything! I didn't expect it to actually be able to decode the signals. I was surprised to find a correlation between the modem losing sync and a visually-distinct pattern appearing on the scope though.
> if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support
Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith effort to resolve it with them beforehand.
What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they have no reason to bother actually even providing the service. Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money providing you with a service) to it being their problem (they now need to convince you to give them money).
Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden, and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of when you will need to do this again, not if).
Stopping payment sounds good, but may not work for a couple of reasons:
1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.
2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.
3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble
> They will disconnect your service and send your unpaid bills to collections
I've done it; both are true and yet not the end of the world:
Disconnect the service: this is obvious, but if you're doing this because the service is not usable and you are switching to another provider anyway, so good riddance? Best case scenario they magically fix the problem, worst-case no change.
Collections: yes, they called, I provided evidence of my communication with the provider trying to resolve it in good faith. Never heard back since and it's been 6 years.
Collections agencies have a business to run and focus on collecting valid debt. Invalid debt is a liability to them and they're not in the business of adjudicating disputes, so once provided with the evidence they drop the matter (of course the provider can still pursue you directly, which is why it's important to keep evidence of your good-faith efforts to resolve the matter).
So you're actually proposing that folks cancel their service and switch to an alternative, just with extra steps that risk harassment and credit impact. Cool.
Of course this only works if you have an alternative to switch to, which OP and most people in the US do not. I can't burn my relationship with my ISP because then I will not be able to do my job.
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.
No idea about NJ, but here in NM, the PUC (Public Utilities Commission) says that they have authority over telephone service only and can do nothing about internet service (even if it is the same company and same wire bundle).
The key is to look up your local city or county franchise agreements for ISP right-of-ways and then contact those people and that agency. They should be Google-able because they’re public record. In the US, anyway.
That doesn't actually work here in my part of NM. The company is the phone company, the wiring was installed on the same easements that they used to provide phone service. The problem is that the PUC, which controls phone service, has no jurisdictional authority under state law over internet service (and neither does any other state agency). At least this is what the PUC told us during a multiway zoom meeting between residents, the phone company/ISP, the PUC and two county commissioners.
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.
Registered mail with proof of delivery works and is scary for them because it's a legally-admissible paper trail and proof of you trying to resolve the problem in good faith, which will complicate any of their attempts to collect money out of you down the line should you choose to stop paying (which you should also do if they don't address the issue in a reasonable timeframe).
Send the letter via overnight mail - or better yet, FedEx. Mail goes to a mail room which may or may not be screened. FedEx seems far more “important”, and make it to the executive’s assistant’s desk who is far more likely to act on it.
Executive Email Carpet Bombing no longer works well, even with a cogent, calm, clear explanation of the issue and what you want them to do. At best it gets sent to a customer service manager, but in my experience it often gets sent to a black hole.
Half the execs at my company have declared email bankruptcy, and even if you work with them and they're expecting an email from you, you have to follow up in person or text them to tell them to check their email for the email they asked you to send them.
This can work. I have mixed results these days, usually down to issues of finding the right email addresses. I've been using SignalHire, but I need to use one with a deeper, more accurate database.
Yeah, the trick is just getting to the other side of the "support wall". They go to great lengths to keep customers from wasting all their time (which frankly would indeed happen), but if you can get through (err, around) with a legitimate issue, the person on the other side usually cares about getting it fixed.
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.