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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

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 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?

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 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.

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.

>Everyone downstream of whatever is broken on their infrastructure probably has it too.

Probably?

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?

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 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'd start my own ISP for the area

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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...