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.
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 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.
>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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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 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 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?
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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 it was someone trying to help and being cheeky about it.
My brother ran the article through gemini and left that comment
So parts of it could just be hallucinations. Not great.
>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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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 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 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?
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.
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!
I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I had a similar issue with WOW.
The US gov't broke up AT&T and killed Bell Labs for this, so at least they owe us to bust this monopoly
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.
The author explains in the article they’re looking for gigabit service and Comcast is the only player in the area.
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'd start my own ISP for the area
It's possible if you have the startup cash https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20726906
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.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
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.
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 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.
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
> I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to care less.
Maybe they were doing this?
https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8
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.
[flagged]
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.
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.
everybody has a fraction of that speed