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There's more to running a good ISP than support. Good service is a bigger driver than customer service. And expectation management is a total lifecycle thing, if you let customers set their own expectations then the service is probably trash by default and your customer support staff will get the blame.

The solutions I see are 2 fold.

1. ISP gets completely involved in your home network, any kind of point of demarcation is completely scrapped in favour of optimising your home wifi.

2. ISP provides the best service they possibly can within reason, has good expectation management and is very firm with their demarc.

3. large scale provider with some kind of physical or regulated monopoly and the end users can smoke meat cigars.

1 has very diminishing returns. If you have 300 subscribers and only 5 of them are on dodgy links, you can get very involved with your customers network issues. But this doesnt scale, and when you try to scale you have left customers with all sorts of expectations. Its hard to package too, because theres a push to end call out fees. If you are rolling truck for "Why facebook slow" it can literally end your business.

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freeone3000 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Lots of ISPs (at least the Bell and Telus rebrands) are now doing remote-managed “home hubs” with integrated wifi that can be remote managed by the ISP. This solves the call-out problem and also fixes user expectations — and they’re leased not sold, so they can actually be good wifi devices.

I don’t personally use them, because “ISP managed wifi” sounds like a bad idea to me, but I can see the value to people who can’t distinguish the above two terms.

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nijave a day ago | parent | next [-]

Assuming the ISPs equipment works correctly. AT&T fiber in the U.S. has apparently had issues for months with a few patches to stabilize things.

My Tp-Link Omada AP has better coverage and speed. I setup my parents up with edgerouterx and Tp-Link AP and it's been hands off for the last 1+ years.

If ISPs can actually offer decent equipment I think it's a win but that seems like more the exception than norm. Reasonably priced prosumer and small business equipment has been way more stable in my experience.

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protocolture 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah I worked with one of those, a few months after I stopped playing with it, the company dropped the product entirely. Considering it could only be managed through their portal I saw lots of teeth gnashing from providers who had significant numbers in production.

> but I can see the value to people who can’t distinguish the above two terms.

The issue is that you have both as customers. And having multiple packages with different price points can cause headaches.

You really need "Bad customer brand" with phat packages for people who cant use tech and "good customer brand" that offers a good service with little to no support. And keep them separate as possible.

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Sabinus 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As long as it's optional and they still allow BYOD it's a good solution for some customers.

	▲	freeone3000 a day ago \| parent [-]
		BYOD barely existed for cable (since DOCSIS specifies ISP remote management as part of the spec) and doesn’t exist at all for fiber. If you mean your own router: yeah, I do that, they don’t support it but there’s no real way to stop me? I do end up double-NAT’d but my real router is DMZ’d so there’s no practical issue… until they start issuing IPv6.

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o11c 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem with "ISP gets into your home network" is that that locks the user out of a lot of important diagnostic tools on the router. I can't even view what kind of configuration it has.