Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)

245 pointsposted 9 months ago
by RadixDLT
(arstechnica.com)

195 Comments

userbinator

9 months ago

a gigabit customer who was paying $50 extra per month for unlimited data was flagged by Cox because he was using 8TB to 12TB a month

"Unlimited data" should mean you can saturate the connection 24/7. Anything less is deceptive advertising. For a gigabit connection, that would mean around 300TB per month.

ReverseCold

9 months ago

I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate. The FCC should probably require this to be disclosed in some standard location. So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed.

The internet is a series of tubes! You can get a dedicated gigabit sized tube but it’ll cost 1-2 orders of magnitude more.

E: Even elsewhere on this thread people are like

> I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down.

Yes! You are the noisy neighbor getting lucky that your neighbors aren’t also noisy!

ahnick

9 months ago

It's pretty obvious isn't it? They don't want anyone to understand how the system really works. They should not be allowed to put the words "Unlimited" anywhere in their advertisement. period. It's all deceptive advertising and they should be raked over the coals for it.

If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest. Cable companies are soul sucking monopolies/duopolies and deserve no quarter.

Sophira

9 months ago

That reminds me of the way JCPenney had a thing where they would do no promotional pricing in a bid to be honest with the consumer about the actual price of their products... and it backfired massively. People assumed that because they didn't have any sales that they weren't the cheapest prices.

In the end, people go for what they perceive to be the cheapest prices, not necessarily the prices that actually are the cheapest.

nyjah

9 months ago

I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest

Competitor services? Starlink aside, I have no options but what I have. I think many people at least in USA are in similar situation.

dehrmann

9 months ago

There's a difference between a data center connection and a home connection. For 99% of home users, moderately oversubscribed gigabit is perfectly fine, and no one would pay the premium (and it's a big premium) for more. Once 1 GB downloads are slow or the connection can't handle 5 HD streams, it's getting into false advertising territory.

SkiFire13

9 months ago

> If it's shared then say "Shared gigabit internet for only X dollars!" I guess the reason they don't do that is because a lot of people would choose competitor services if they were honest.

I don't think any competitor will give you a dedicated gigabit to you for a reasonable price, especially if everyone suddently starts asking for one.

no_wizard

9 months ago

I have Ziply Fiber in Oregon.

I pay for a Symmetrical gigabit connection, it’s 60 dollars a month. I record speed tests multiple times a day every day and have ever since I got the service last year. They’re growing gang busters too, my entire neighborhood is on Ziply (90% of household converted from what I understand)

Aside from them adjusting some things due to the rapid unexpected uptake, I have gotten full connection speeds for upload and download every day for over a year. Its been uptime of 99.999% (the adjustment period happened over 2 days and they only slowed service to 300/300 temporarily)

It can be done. It won’t be done by Comcast et. al.

oooyay

9 months ago

I'm also in Oregon, specifically Portland. DMARCs for fiber are largely shared by providers which is why you can have multiple providers in a given area. That way they don't take up extra pole space and the city can pay a single provider to maintain sections of line.

As long as the DMARC isn't saturated then you're only limited by the other lines also going to the DMARC and the collective activity of subscribers upstream of you between you and the central office. That's to say, you are right that it can be done but only insofar as other posters have indicated: last mile providers need to provision higher capacity lines between the DMARC and the central office.

SkiFire13

9 months ago

This doesn't prove anything, it just means that when you're doing a speedtest there aren't other users that are also saturating the connection.

Note that this doesn't means that there are exactly 0 users downloading in those moments. Usually there are multiple gigabits dedicated to a group of users, so that multiple users can navigate at 1Gbps without slowing down others, but not all the group at once. How much bandwidth is allocated to how many users can vary though, and some providers might allocate less total bandwidth to more users.

In practice this works out fine most of the time and most users won't notice slowdowns like you do, but if everyone started a speedtest at the same time you will notice it.

daeros

9 months ago

i'm in oregon and those assholes won't provide fiber to the home to my neighborhood on the far western edge of the metro area out near forest grove.

trilbyglens

9 months ago

Them none should be allowed to advertise as such

internet101010

9 months ago

There usually are no competitors.

brewdad

9 months ago

Most people should have at least two choices. Their cable company and their phone company. These choices may be comparable in price and service level or wildly divergent depending on your specific location however.

kelnos

9 months ago

I live in San Francisco, and Comcast's DOCSIS 3.1 offering (~1Gbps down / 25Gbps up) is my only useful option. AT&T offers DSL, and MonkeyBrains will give me a microwave link (more or less symmetric, but probably would top out at around 100Mbps), but that's it, aside from the LTE/5G providers.

I live one block away from one of the main fiber trunks in the city, but I was quoted (both by Comcast and AT&T) that it would be $20k-$30k to run that fiber to my building.

Unfortunately I think my experience is pretty common in the US, though sure, there are plenty of people who can choose between e.g. cable and fiber.

daeros

9 months ago

They won't even let me pay them the 20k-30k even after I made it clear that it might take me awhile to save it up, but I could feasibly do it.

userbinator

9 months ago

There's two (interrelated) values here --- speed ("flow rate") and volume.

"Unlimited data" refers to volume.

Gigabit refers to speed.

This customer presumably isn't too worried about the speed, but is rightly under the impression that he isn't being charged on volume and can thus use as much as the speed allows.

vlz

9 months ago

Ok, but you cannot truthfully advertise unlimited volume if you put a limit on the speed which is in turn also limiting the volume.

SAI_Peregrinus

9 months ago

When it first started back in the Before Times, "Unlimited" internet was in contrast to dial-up connections which weren't always on. It's unlimited in time (as long as you're subscribed), not necessarily guaranteed to keep the max speed for the entire time.

That contrast is now gone, so it's become deceptive IMO.

lostlogin

9 months ago

That isn’t my recollection. We had dial up which had a data use cap. We had to stay under the cap or got stung. Later on ‘unlimited’ dial up became a thing.

willcipriano

9 months ago

NetZero and AOL both advertised as unlimited. If you had a extra phone line you could connect and download for as long as you'd like.

userbinator

9 months ago

A 56kbps dialup connection saturated 24/7 will get you ~18GB per month.

kelnos

9 months ago

Yes, and in the 90s that was a truly incredible amount of data, when most of their customers were probably transferring a few tens of megabytes per month at most.

I don't think I even had 18GB of disk space back then.

lostlogin

9 months ago

My dad bought a 600mb disk at vast expense. What did your dad have?

pixelatedindex

9 months ago

That was a ton back then! I suppose 300TB/month is a lot too but it doesn’t feel that big anymore

lostlogin

9 months ago

I’m not sure what people are doing at home, but that seems a hell of a lot to me to me. I use 3-10TB a month and thought that was a lot.

pixelatedindex

9 months ago

I don’t think it’s about people doing it at home, but how we don’t really blink an eye when a terrabyte is mentioned. We will even start getting 60TB drives in a few years.

plussed_reader

9 months ago

For as long as you'd pay the phone bill plus isp sub.

zie

9 months ago

When I ran an ISP or two back in the dialup days, we advertised unlimited, but we didn't mean anything with that word, it was just what every other ISP also used in their marketing, we were just following along. The same is true today with Cellphones and ISP's, they ALL offer "unlimited", but they all have different interpretations of that word. As far as I can tell, none of the employees understand what "unlimited" means either.

Technically what we offered was shared dialup access to a T1 or a T3 upstream. They just looked for the word "unlimited". Customers didn't know what it meant either, except it was "better".

If you were doing anything we thought of as "abusive" we would hang up on you. You could immediately call back in, and we were fine with that.

Normally after the 2nd or 3rd time we caught you being "abusive", we would call you and have a chat: try to figure out what the heck you were doing and why. Most of the time we would just run their data on one of our machines and save the dialup space. They could telnet in and do what they needed doing on occasion. Dialup lines were expensive compared to process space.

Of course we were also one of the few weirdos that had a "community" linux box with the root password in the login banner, so everyone could create their own account and help maintain the community box. It worked really well for several years, until some meanies found it and ruined it. After that we put the root password in /etc/motd, so every logged in user could do root things if needed. That also worked really well for many years.

Different times for sure!

throwup238

9 months ago

If that’s the case they should market the plan’s throttling upfront. “Unlimited mobile data” comes with very clear fine print that isn’t buried in the TOS about how many gigabytes the customer gets before it drops them to 3g speed.

userbinator

9 months ago

I believe in those cases even after you pass the throttling limit you can continue to transfer data at however much 3g speeds will get you for the rest of the billing period, and thus they won't cut off your service for using "too much".

MichaelZuo

9 months ago

3G speeds can technically mean as low as 256kbps so it would in fact be literally unlimited since it’s not that much data total even running 24/7.

wmf

9 months ago

Oversubscription ratios vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Perhaps ISPs could advertise the worst case but that would make their service look worse than it is. And of course no ISP will be the first to disclose.

BTW the FCC recently introduced "nutrition labels" for ISPs. https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

presentation

9 months ago

That’s why I think this has to come through rules and regs - any individual company can be honest, but it would probably come at the cost of dishonest competitors winning customers.

mattnewton

9 months ago

It has to be regulated because in most of the US ISPs have a de-facto monopoly on the infrastructure; the market has failed to produce more competitors with permits to dig and place fiber for a bunch of reasons.

AnthonyMouse

9 months ago

> So many people are mad because “I paid for a gigabit and I can’t use the whole thing”… but like you didn’t pay for a gigabit you paid for a gigabit shared among 100 other people, which means peak-of-sums you should usually get gigabit, but it’s not guaranteed.

But that's something different than what Cox is doing.

"Unlimited" and over-subscription aren't incompatible. You have a gigabit connection, the 40Gbps uplink is shared between 1000 other people who each have a gigabit connection, the over-subscription rate is 25:1. That's fine as long as the average usage during peak hours is 4% -- which it might very well be. A 4k Netflix stream is 25Mbps, which is 2.5% of a gigabit connection, so you're not above that even if everybody is streaming in 4k at once.

You're even fine if everybody is streaming in 4k at once and then on top of that 15 people want to fully max out their connections. And everybody using their connections at once doesn't really happen. At any given time a lot of people will be using zero.

Now, there will be times that are outliers. Maybe a popular video game drops without staggering the release and suddenly 30% of the customers are maxing out their connections at once to download an update and the average speed drops from 1000Mbps to 100Mbps for a couple hours. That's why it says "up to", right? That isn't artificially limiting anyone, that's just everyone getting their pro rata share in a time of atypical demand.

But on a typical day with an adequately provisioned network you should be able to get the speed on the label, and there is still no reason to be limiting anyone's speeds during times the network isn't over capacity.

The issue is they don't want to over-subscribe their network at only the ratio that would allow them to provide the rated speed on a typical day, they want to promise more than they can deliver and deflect blame onto people who are only using what they were promised.

bobdvb

9 months ago

That's true, although the reality is that the capacity is much more limited in many providers local infrastructure than you'd like to think. Those 1000 users will only get 10G at best, and remember that both in Cable and FTTH the spectrum allocation on the local segment is asymmetric.

You have a finite downlink capacity and a finite uplink capacity, users are not just competing for the same time on the wire, they're competing for spectrum. If everyone was on Ethernet to the home then you'd be right, but FTTH and Cable are in physically contended spectrum in the cabinet/cable itself. Proper fibre ethernet costs more per user than FTTH/Cable because each user needs a port on a switch, instead of using TDMA and everyone being on the same wire at the other end.

maxerickson

9 months ago

There's not really any real tension between "you should know their stated rates are bullshit" and "they should accurately describe the service they are willing and able to provide".

One is a stupid way to run a society and the other isn't.

bobdvb

9 months ago

You're never getting 1G 100% of the time, you're getting a target of 1G and statistically if you do a speed test you probably won't be doing that at the same time as everyone else.

A little knowledge can be dangerous, that's not patronising, it's that accurately describing your network topology to all customers is hard and easy to misunderstand. Some segments of the network will be heavily contended, and others will be under utilised. Being heavily contended might be undesirable but it's pragmatically going to happen.

Where it breaks down with customers, is where the segment is over-contended to the point where they consistently can't meet the product description. But that's not a service description issue, it's an investment problem and if it's not being dealt across the board by the provider, then that provider will be crap.

The bigger issue in this case is a lack of effective competition which drives vendors to have a decent quality of service. Being more transparent won't help with an under provisioned network if you have no choice. In markets with poor competition, poor service provision and capacity usually follows.

sqeaky

9 months ago

I have paid for two gigabit connections and I sometimes saturate them for days at time. Doesn't cost that much.

If I am not to use it like that then it should say clearly on the paperwork that I have data limits, and I don't have any such notifications.

godelski

9 months ago

  > I don’t know why they don’t advertise their oversubscription rate.
They typically advertise as "up to" and often hide data limits in small text. This is also common among phone carriers who say "unlimited data" or worse, "unlimited 5G" but then throttle you after you hit a certain data limit.

I'm not saying this to justify their actions. I actually think this is worse because it demonstrates clear intention to mislead. But it's something to be aware of because they will argue (and frequently some smug person that I guess has a boot fetish) and then blame you for not reading. But I strongly disagree. Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt. You can't just hide stuff in legal language. No person has enough time to read all those TOS agreements and even if they did, it's not in normal language that's understandable by the average person. If a contact is fair only if participants are informed and consenting, then I don't think most of these contacts should hold up (they do).

But hey, we live in a world where courts have decided that "boneless wings" doing clearly mean "without bones". But I for one don't want to live in a country where that's okay.

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors with the legal system and I for one don't think enough people are upset. Apathy isn't working.

verisimi

9 months ago

> Words mean things, and they mean what a reasonable person would interrupt.

Interpret. Words mean things, you know.

godelski

9 months ago

Autocorrect. But surprisingly you can still understand because the context. Language is crazy like that. Kinda like how when you order "boneless wings" you expect to get chicken with no bones, especially considering there's a common counterpart "wings".

nixosbestos

9 months ago

Edit: removing an apparently quite inaccurate comment. Apologies.

FredFS456

9 months ago

It /is/ how it works with PON based fibre networks. See https://blog.init7.net/en/overbooking-how-providers-divide-u...

ta1243

9 months ago

Even if you had a dedicated fibre back to a 1G port on a switch in a data centre, there's going to be bottle necks at some point. Sure they could ensure that 48 port switch you're connected to has no contention, but non-blocking networks aren't cheap, and are needed in the vast majority of cases.

namibj

9 months ago

That said, the classic case of game release can be handled with a bit of P2P if the oversubscription happens late enough to have sufficiently many downloads that can share among themselves without causing congestion for others.

Just traffic shape that protocol/connection to only use a connection free share of upstream if upstream is currently close to dropping packets, and work a bit with others to get swarms to prioritize downloading from nodes close in IPv6 address space.

ta1243

9 months ago

Depends on your peer

You and your nearest 400 neighbours plug into a non-blocking 1g port network. Find you can do 1g to your neighbours

But you need a 400g uplink (and remember to account for resilience), so you go into a switch with 40 400g ports, ok, that's 1.6tbit

Scale this up to a small town with 20,000 people and you need 20tbit of backbone to serve your residents with 1G non-blocking, very few will ever use the full 1G

Sharing bandwidth makes perfect sense. If you want uncontended (to where? Local IXP, a major IXP? One on the other side of the world?) then get a business line which gives you uncontended connectivity.

namibj

9 months ago

Uncontended to a dense 1U switch, say 24 downstream ports of 100/200 G QSFP. That's uncontended for 2400/4800 customers with their own 1G links. So about 4~30k people worth, so no, not even up to full city for all but the smallest cities.

jpambrun

9 months ago

Because it's none of our business as customers. This oversubscription rate is a risk they calibrate on their side. Given the marketing material, if all customers decide to use more bandwidth, it up to the utility to upgrade their infra to match in a timely manner. This is the risk they took and competed on.

qaq

9 months ago

40Gbit from he is 2K so no it's not 1-2 orders of magnitude more

TheDong

9 months ago

I think you're trying to imply that it should be $50 for 1Gbit with that comment, but HE fiber and residential fiber aren't comparable. Apples and oranges.

HE only has to run relatively short cables within a datacenter, which is designed for running those things, while residential fiber has to be run much further through much more hostile terrain.

Residential fiber takes more total land and maintenance and has different customer density per unit laid.

Unless HE also offers residential fiber at that rate, don't think it's comparable.

qaq

9 months ago

I am implying dedicated lines do not cost 2 orders of magnitude more. he has POPs and provides connectivity to places other than datacenters. Also if you didn't notice many datacenters are for obvious reasons located in the boonies to begin with.

beloch

9 months ago

I used to have an "unlimited bandwidth" account with Shaw Cable in Canada, back before Rogers bought them. "Unlimited" was very much front and centre in all the advertising, etc..

They started charging me overage fees. I called them up and asked them to explain why they were charging me overage fees on an unlimited bandwidth account.

Their explanation was that the bandwidth was unlimited in when I could use it, not in how much I could use.

Fortunately for me, there were other providers in the market that I could switch to. So I did.

userbinator

9 months ago

Did you ask them what times you are allowed to use a non-unlimited account?

kristopolous

9 months ago

A number of years ago one of the isps, might have been att dsl, argued that "unlimited" was a branding name for a tier. They had meant an affectation of limitless possibilities as a marketing term similar to "plus", "extreme" or "pro" and not that there was no cap on the data. I always ignore that word now and look for the actual terms

mindslight

9 months ago

Hear hear! Furthermore any plans with "caps" should have to list the average bandwidth as the largest headline, with the peak bandwidth relegated to a subpoint. For example 1TB/month is 386 kB/sec. That's on par with a DSL connection, not 2024 broadband.

tzs

9 months ago

That would mislead and confuse a lot of consumers. It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit would be better than a 500 Mb/s cable connection with a 1 TB data limit, when in fact something like 90% of users will not come anywhere near 1 TB of data/month and will be much much much happier on the cable plan.

userbinator

9 months ago

It would suggest that a 5 Mb/s DSL connection with no data limit

That turns out to be a ~1.6TB/month limit.

Hence why I think both speed and volume limits should be advertised prominently. "Up to 5Mbps (1.6TB/month)" or "Up to 500Mbps (or 1TB/month, whichever comes first)" gives users a clear idea of what their service is.

mindslight

9 months ago

It works fine over in the cell phone market, where carriers market themselves in terms of HSPA/4G/LTE/5G while plans are sold in terms of data used. Rough instantaneous bandwidth (and latency!) is fine for knowing what applications will work. 300Mb/s vs 500Mb/s isn't going to make much of a difference for most, and certainly not more than ISPs necessarily massage the numbers when talking about shared mediums like docsis/gpon.

The point I am making is that if fixed carriers seemingly no longer want to be selling connections by last-mile bandwidth (with implied statistical oversubscription and a fall-back to best effort), and instead want to move to selling specific amounts of data delivered, then their big-print marketing should have to reflect that!

Or alternatively, if they want to stick with selling the instantaneous last mile connection speed, then data quotas should have to raise along with that according to a standard benchmark consumer usage - say 2 hours of nameplate usage per day, meaning a 300Mb/s connection would be ~6TB/month. And then additional data usage should cost the same (or lower) as the monthly plan - for example $120/month for that 6TB/month plan is $20/TB, so 1TB of additional data should cost no more than $20 rather than the current punitive or even unobtainable pricing.

Also I'd guess your 90%/1TB figure is quite out of date, which gets to the heart of the problem here - these limits have remained arbitrary and opaque rather than being expressed in the market. It gets even more rotten when talking about national policy where these ISPs have been able to claim they're providing modern "broadband" while their backhaul networks have been seemingly frozen in time for a decade+.

Although, a disclaimer: I only read these threads to gawk at the train wreck and check if the Internet access market is really still this bad. I've got municipal gpon at 1Gb/s symmetric, no caps (I've asked multiple times), with a fixed price every month. Which really just underscores the absurdity of talking about this topic in a negative-sum parceling out of bits and bytes, which mostly stems from Ma Coax wanting to continue milking their captive markets on aging infrastructure.

kstrauser

9 months ago

Put another way, if they're saying 12TB is their unadvertised effective data cap, he's only allowed to use his connection for 1 day a month.

My ISP lets me use the service all of the days of the month, not just one. His ludicrously low limit is unfathomable.

sneak

9 months ago

They can lie all they want; they are integrated with the government and they have no consequences for fraud.

I gave Cox over $2000 explicitly for unlimited data and still got nastygrams from them for uploading 4TB of my original digital photos to S3 for backup.

It’s effectively illegal to start new ISPs in America, that’s why this shit happens.

kstrauser

9 months ago

I would absolutely forward those to my state's public utilities commission.

sgarland

9 months ago

Who do you think the telcos are lobbying?

kstrauser

9 months ago

Then it’s extra important to remind the regulators that the telcos are blowing smoke up their ass. If they’re only hearing the telcos’ side, they might be under the mistaken impression that it’s the truth.

sgarland

9 months ago

You’re under the impression that the regulators give a shit about their constituents, rather than campaign donations.

kstrauser

9 months ago

I only have so much cynicism to go around. For my own mental health, I have to presume that at least some people in charge want to do the right thing, and I act accordingly.

thunky

9 months ago

"Unlimited data" means that you can use as much as you want/can without being charged more based on usage. Otherwise there would be a cap and you are charged extra when you go over it.

It has nothing to do with speed/bandwidth.

Just like "unlimited text" plans don't charge per text message. But there is still a physical limit for how many texts you can send.

exabrial

9 months ago

So call it 300tb/month, not unlimited, and quit lying?

datahack

9 months ago

How is this nonsense still legal? It’s straight up nothing but deceptive advertising.

fennecfoxy

9 months ago

In NZ if you buy x mbps then you must get x mbps, at all times.

Fire-Dragon-DoL

9 months ago

And this is a gigabit customer using 4% of their maximum. What the heck?

AyyEye

9 months ago

Cox advertised gigabit to me. I always wanted it so I took the upsell. After six truckrolls (alternately telling me my signal was too strong -- installing attenuator, then too weak and removing it) for which I had to take a day off work every time, they eventually told me it was a mistake and my neighborhood didn't have gigabit.

Then the cherry on top was they wouldn't even put me back on my old plan because it "wasn't offered any more". So they tried to charge me an extra $15/month for half the speed I was getting before. I switched to a local wireless ISP that ended up being even more expensive for even slower service -- but at least they weren't liars and when I had a problem I could talk directly with the owner if it wasn't sorted (and no data caps).

idatum

9 months ago

I can't but think this is the business practice of a dying technology, yet another example.

I won the fiber lottery where I live, and I will never go back to cable (I had a choice). Let's just call the rejected cable choice a "30 Rock episode".

And that same cable provider eventually was called out for advertising a "10G Plan!". Yeah.

Meanwhile my fiber provider advertises options based on symmetric upload/download speeds. And I think this is the key in these days when we send a lot of outbound data with video call and offline backups.

Put in place a rule that only the lowest speed can be advertised by providers.

bachmeier

9 months ago

Cox was terrible - they knew they were the only broadband provider in my neighborhood and they took full advantage of it. Then AT&T put in fiber (when they installed it they put the box on my property) and I had seven times the speed for a fraction of the cost. When I called to cancel, Cox tried to cut me a deal.

ct0

9 months ago

They don't call it Cox for nothing, damn you got hosed on that one. I've always been careful with upsells as there's always a catch, or a Cox.

AyyEye

9 months ago

They made the choice to name themselves after a bunch of dicks.

rkagerer

9 months ago

There's a lot to be said for the better customer service and straightforward treatment. Worth the extra premium you got hosed with in the end.

createaccount99

9 months ago

Did you sue? Isn't that false advertising?

fn-mote

9 months ago

In the US you could seek recourse via your state Attorney General. You might hope the FCC would care (but they don’t).

The GP already lost 6 days of work… how much would the likely payoff be to make it work their while to continue dealing with that company?

cyberax

9 months ago

FCC can be surprisingly effective. My friend had a problem with his ISP randomly dropping routes to some of the ASs, and the support was useless, because all the speed test sites were fine

An FCC complaint got that fixed in two weeks.

addled

9 months ago

An additional option to consider is to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.

I had an issue with my wireless carrier repeatedly refusing to issue credit for a months-long ongoing problem on their end.

Within 2 days in filing a BBB complaint, I had a rep from the company asking how much I thought seemed fair and if I wanted a bill credit or a check.

slimsag

9 months ago

The attorney general’s office consumer protection division in your state does what most people think the BBB does.

BBB is just a review website. Like Yelp.

Filing a complaint with BBB is like saying 'I left a bad Yelp review' ... useful, maybe.. if the company cares..

thrtythreeforty

9 months ago

You can't buy the satisfaction that comes from forcing the phone company to do what you require.

kstrauser

9 months ago

> to do what you require.

"To do what they advertised to you."

kevingadd

9 months ago

When Comcast tried to screw me out of $700 the FCC solved it for me pretty quick. I'd at least recommend giving them a try even if in the end they may not help.

sneak

9 months ago

It costs many thousands of dollars to bring a lawsuit in the US, and you will almost certainly lose against a huge corporation with their own legal team. They can simply outspend you until you give up.

throwup238

9 months ago

Not if the amounts are small enough for small claims court. The laws vary state by state but here in California, the max for small claims is $10,000 and the company can’t just hire a legal firm to defend it, they have to send a corporate representative. They can send a lawyer if they have general counsel employed by the company, but few companies are big enough to have that and those that are generally won’t send them out for small claims. Many times they won’t bother at all and it results in a default judgement.

The filling fees are in the hundreds of dollars and the judge are used to working with the general public as opposed to well represented plaintiffs with expensive lawyers.

hansvm

9 months ago

You can often take telcos to small claims for the few dozens or hundreds they owe you, and they won't bother to show up. You'll get a default judgement for the cost of court filing (varies, $20-$100 usually). If they don't pay, you bring the sherrif to one of their offices to start dragging out an equivalent resale value of equipment unless somebody writes a check in ahurry.

AyyEye

9 months ago

Wasn't worth it, I just wanted internet.

lolinder

9 months ago

Needs (2020). They may or may not still be doing this, but this exact article was already on HN at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23460868

jamesy0ung

9 months ago

Yeah I thought it was a bit odd the mention of Pandemic internet traffic given most companies are now forcing return to office. Makes sense now.

throwaway48476

9 months ago

"Heavy" use is just using what they pay for. If they can't guarantee that they should sell a lesser tier of service. Otherwise this is just fraud.

dboreham

9 months ago

They paid for committed bandwidth? So they'd be paying $1000+/mo. But they're not.

wincy

9 months ago

I dunno, I pay $70 a month for gigabit from Google Fiber and absolutely saturate that thing all day long up and down. A Google PM got me on a call and asked me if I wanted 20 gigabit for $200 a month the other day. No restrictions, I could run my business off my $70 if I really wanted to.

I don’t know what Cox is going on about, they need to get with the program.

kstrauser

9 months ago

I pay $50 for 10 gigabits from Sonic. I don’t abuse it by deliberately running a speed test 24/7 or anything like that. I do use it for anything I want, at any time, without pausing to consider how much data it takes. Launch a NAS backup at 2PM on a weekday? Stream 4K video on 2 TVs at the same time? Download a mass of software updates? Without a second’s hesitation. The CEO is on record being very explicit that they sell you Internet access so you can use it as you see fit.

I have the best ISP in the country. You can’t convince me otherwise.

zootboy

9 months ago

I've been pushing an average of 10 TiB per month through my Sonic 10 Gbps fiber, mainly upload. Never had an issue or complaint. And really, even if my XGS-PON fiber is split between 32 customers, that's still ~300 Mbps per customer, which I'm nowhere near hitting.

Cerium

9 months ago

Absolutely amazing ISP. A while back my power went out. About three minutes later I got a text message (not from PG&E!) but from Sonic: (something like ..) "We noticed your connection went down and are running automated diagnostics." a few minutes later I got another text message which informed me that other nearby hardware they operate has lost power so they presume that my building has also lost power. Just a delightful experience.

xcskier56

9 months ago

I think US internet would give you a run for your money on best ISP in the country. Been doing gigabit symmetrical for probably close to 10 years at very reasonable prices. When I called customer support about having a static IP, just ended up talking shop with whoever was on the other side. Amazing

kelnos

9 months ago

I'm so jealous. Every now and then I check to see if Sonic is available at my address, but I'm always disappointed. No one wants to spend the money to run fiber down my street, even though the trunk is a block away.

lotsofpulp

9 months ago

This one is probably in contention:

https://epb.com/

kstrauser

9 months ago

Other than being 6x the price though.

lotsofpulp

9 months ago

I wonder if it’s because EBP is a utility and so has a mandate to run fiber to all homes in its area, as opposed to private ISPs that can pick and choose.

kstrauser

9 months ago

That could be. Sonic has pretty good coverage local from leasing fiber from AT&T. Even then there are still dead spots in my city where people are stuck with Comcast et al. They only recently rolled out their own fiber several months ago where I live. That day my speed went up 10x and the cost cut in half.

It's a no-brainer for people who live in their coverage area, yet as you say, their coverage isn't complete.

But it's still $50 for 10Gb where offered.

tshaddox

9 months ago

That’s cool but it won’t work if everyone in your zip code tries to do it.

throwaway48476

9 months ago

Specifically the fraud is advertising gb service instead of 10mb99. QoS. It's as ridiculously as selling a prius that can do 200mph as little as 0 percent of the time.

They want to advertise their sevrice as meeting the federal broadband speed without having to actually build a network that can support it. That's fraud.

Dylan16807

9 months ago

For a thousand dollars of dedicated bandwidth I'd expect more like 10Gbps.

And a residential ISP would still be able to massively overcommit despite such a guarantee.

kelnos

9 months ago

Of course not, what a bad-faith argument. They're paying for an unlimited shared connection. If a lot of other people are using it, they'll get lower speeds. But if not, they should get the speed commensurate with the package they purchased, for whatever amount of time there's not enough contention to throttle them. If that means they pull 1Gbps for every second of every day of the month, so be it. If not, that's life.

amluto

9 months ago

I pay considerably less that that for colocated 1 Gbps, from a Tier 1 provider, which includes rack space, air conditioning, and power.

dboreham

9 months ago

You're not actually getting 1Gbps 95%-ile.

xyst

9 months ago

Story was reported on in 2020, during the peak of the lockdowns as well.

We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power. In return, they abuse us, they collude to make sure other ISPs do not compete against each other to justify high prices and low bandwidth, and hire lobbyists to implement/push stupid laws in various states to prevent municipal ISPs (eg, Texas).

lotsofpulp

9 months ago

Voters should be demanding their local governments roll out fiber as a utility like Chattanooga, TN.

brewdad

9 months ago

I have a solid fiber service from a private company but my town is also building out a municipal fiber network. I’m bummed because the latest expansion zone stopped about 100 yards from my house and they won’t be doing the rest of my street until 2027. Like I said, I already have a pretty good service but muni fiber would save me almost $400 a year for the same speeds and reportedly the same or better reliability.

verisimi

9 months ago

> We truly fucked ourselves by giving these national ISPs so much power.

Why did you give them so much power? Maybe you should have asked questions, drawn up better agreements.

drdaeman

9 months ago

Is agreement negotiation even a thing in B2C nowadays, especially with any larger companies? I thought it’s all non-negotiable take-or-leave.

walrus01

9 months ago

The root cause of the problem is that copper coaxial cable tv based (DOCSIS3.0, DOCSIS3.1, etc) last mile internet infrastructure is a shared/contended access medium for many modems connected to it.

It's built on a limited number of RF channels in a certain segment that have many modems all going to a single "port" on a DOCSIS CMTS (cablemodem termination system).

There is a great deal of absurdity in their claims to be selling a gigabit service product using coax-based technology, when the oversubscription ratio is INSANE. If you had more than a few customers on a segment trying to actually make use of gigabit speeds at one time (just 2 or 3 people downloading a torrent of a popular linux ISO at 980 Mbps will eat a huge amount of the total aggregate capacity of that coax segment).

Cox and Comcast and RCN and similar operators are squeezing every last dollar possible for the ROI out of legacy copper coaxial last mile stuff. Only in places where the local phone company or another operator is building proper FTTH (GPON/XGSPON) are they starting to overbuild their own network with their own FTTH. Comcast is doing it in the Seattle area, for instance, in areas where the local telco (Ziply or Centurylink) offers a symmetric 1 Gbps product based on single strand FTTH/GPON.

Your average coaxial cable tv last mile operator like Cox is a telecom industry dinosaur.

The article here was published in early 2020 during peak covid19 lockdown but the general technology problem of copper/coaxial last mile stuff from 25+ years ago is exactly the same today.

zamadatix

9 months ago

The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too. Among them the typical ratio is ~32 PON users for the given "base rate" PON standard, similar to a typical ~20-50 for coax at a given DOCSIS standard. Both have better/worse examples (particularly early gigabit PON deployments were 64) but FTTH has rarely been about getting dedicated bandwidth up to the neighborhood box... honestly most of the time the lion's share of the benefits are "it's a sign your area just got upgraded cabling and equipment for the first time in many many years" than anything to do with the physicalities of the wire.

For GPON that's 2.5 Gbps for downstream and 1.25 Gbps for upstream. So with a 32 split it's the same story of 2-3 people downloading a popular Linux ISO at 980 Mbps still eat up the entire fiber line for all 32 people.

The difference on the fiber, outside the better upload symmetry we already see, is it will be able to scale a lot more in the future. Some places already have 10G PON (which, unlike GPON, is usually actually said speed) such as where ATT offers 2G and 5G symmetric service. The next step will be 25G PON (again, about the actual nominal speed).

walrus01

9 months ago

> The FTTH offerings from Ziply, Cox, Comcast, Google, ATT, Centurylink etc are all the same "shared media with high oversubscription" design too.

No, they're really not, you can't compare single strand FTTH XGSPON on singlemode fiber (16:1 or 32:1 contention ratio), something that is built on 10G XGSPON tech, to something that is built on bonded RF channels on coax copper. The aggregate capacity per oversubscribed network segment is radically different.

Now, all of these cable operators also ARE building actual FTTH networks in certain areas because they see the writing on the wall for the longevity of how much more they can squeeze out of the copper. So in some very specific places the Comcast 1 Gbps last mile product is functionally equivalent to the local Verizon, or Ziply, or Lumen (Centurylink, now branded as Quantum Fiber) FTTH product.

zamadatix

9 months ago

DOCSIS 3.1 is extremely comparable to PON in terms of oversubscription design (in bandwidth and allocation breakout). The largest difference between the two is DOCSIS uses dynamic bonding of OFDM channels to chop up the ~10 Gbps of bandwidth while 10G-PON uses TDM to slice up the bandwidth.

The physical medium itself really has next to nothing to do with it. You can TDM and OFDM on both fiber and coax. The bandwidth is a factor of the total frequency and modulation methods.

FTTH is popular for new rollouts because it's cheaper to rollout and run. It uses less power, it goes longer distances, it's cheaper to repeat if you need to, it's cheaper to upgrade to the next generation of PON. It also has a better scaling future, but I already mentioned that above.

walrus01

9 months ago

> The physical medium itself really has next to nothing to do with it.

yes, it does, because actual fiber is significantly more future-proof. The same boring 9/125 fiber that's being built today is capable of 100/200/400 Gbps ethernet with only a change in electronics at the ends. Can't say the same for coax. Even the must rudimentary DWDM with 10G OOK optics on single strand or two strands of fiber has vastly more capacity than anything coax based.

No matter how you slice it the coax has a much more limited service lifespan and eventual capacity exhaustion problem compared to the more creative solutions that can be employed in the future to grow beyond the capabilities of 10G XGSPON.

Your typical 10G XGSPON setup like with 16:1 or 32:1 split and single strand to the home, is only using maybe 2% to 5% of the actual available THz channels that exist (in the 1470 to 1610 bandwidth range) in the fiber. There's a vast amount of empty channel space in that fiber for future bidi optic usage scenarios if you know how DWDM stuff works.

The RF on coax, on the other hand, is using pretty much every viable frequency in the bands that will work on the coax and is already at its limit.

wincy

9 months ago

An actual Google PM called me up the other day trying to upsell me to $200 a month 20 gigabit. Said they’d give me a router but I’m free to hook whatever I want to the fiber, saturate it as much as I want, no worries. They must have a lot of extra bandwidth if this is a service they’re offering in my neighborhood.

zamadatix

9 months ago

That'd be the testing of the 25G-PON. They say you can do that because they known oversubscription ratios of 32:1 really aren't such a horrible concept. Think about it - they told you and a couple dozen others to blast it with 20G up and 20G down as much as you want... and how often do you actually use anywhere near that much? When you do, how long are you actually using the full pipe? For 99.999% of home users high last mile oversubscription makes perfect sense and allows the network to be built out SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper.

High last mile oversubscription is a net good for home consumers, it almost always works out in everyone's favor. The exception is that 1 guy in 10000 that will actually somehow use 20 gbps a day all day every day in some neighborhood and create some drama in the news because ISPs can't be bothered to try to explain why oversubscription is good to everyone who already doubts them.

walrus01

9 months ago

In the active ethernet FTTH and GPON/XGSPON last mile world, to put it in the most casual language possible, you can put a metric fuckton of 1 Gbps symmetric residential last mile users on a single 10 Gbps full duplex uplink before anyone starts to notice that they aren't seeing 1 Gbps speed tests.

Or before you can no longer claim that you are delivering 1 Gbps.

Your average residential user does not move that much traffic at all, if you have a traffic chart that's something like 60s SNMP interface bit counter poller interval for their CPE, fed into a time series db, and draw grafana charts for that customer over a 1 day or 1 week or 1 month period of time.

Even when a customer does something like buy several new 140GB xbox games in one day, the actual amount of time that they're really utilizing that link near full capacity in the same 24 hour period is very minimal.

The only caveat is that you need to be able to watch out for the 1 or 2% of outlier/heavy use customers who will really use their link for huge amounts of data. In many neighborhoods there won't be any of those.

zamadatix

9 months ago

You can put the same number of 1 GBPs users on a 10G-PON link as a 10G DOCSIS3.1 link. The determination is total bandwidth, which is why the over subscription profile of each is identical despite being physically different. You are correct that the over subscription ratio itself is almost never a problem. The common cause of it still being able to become a problem being whenever bandwidth increases ISPs start offering higher speeds. E.g. with 10G transports carriers start offering >gbps plans so the story repeats where some isolated case of 2 or 3 users on the same segment thrash it.

I'm not saying this as anti-PON, just that the existing coax improvements are sometimes very sensible and extremely comparable in the current generation. I've architected and deployed several small city G-PON and 10G-PON networks with Nokia gear and it's fantastic for net new and probably the only real option to continue growing 5-10 years from now. That said, if you've already got decent coax for the last mile DOCSIS 3.1 can be extremely comparable and behave near identically at the moment.

walrus01

9 months ago

It's true that the capacity is nearly the same at the moment with docsis3.1, but consider that a docsis3.1 system that is using pretty much EVERY viable RF channel can just barely have the same capacity as a 10G XGSPON system that is using maybe 1-2% of the THz channels available in normal singlemode fiber.

If you look at a typical residential 16:1 or 32:1 split XGSPON system on an optical spectrum analyzer that's capable of all DWDM ranges, it looks gapingly empty. There's just a few channels used for the downstream and upstream with the timeslicing for the various CPEs' usage. And vast ranges of totally empty optical space.

What I find interesting is that your average residential user does NOT really use much more traffic in (in average Mbps per CPE or GB per month) if you give them a 2.5Gbps or 5 Gbps or 10 Gbps connection. I have plenty of 2.5Gbps and 5 Gbps and 10 Gbps customers. Maybe 1-2% of them are really heavy users. The rest of them use exactly the same amount of traffic as the 1 Gbps users, because the vast majority of non-technical residential end users these days have only wifi client devices. Finding someone who has a desktop PC with a 1000BaseT or 2.5GBaseT LAN port to do a proper speed test is maybe 1 in 50 customers.

Even if you've got people with 3x3 802.11ax stuff running in 80 MHz channels they're just barely going to approach 900 Mbp speed tests downstream one way.

If we had offered 10G FTTH to the home in 2002 the sort of power user who would buy that might actually try to run a small server farm out of their spare bedroom. But now it's 2024 and people who are serious about hosting their own stuff are doing it with their own VM/VPS/cloud based stuff, or by colocating a few servers, etc. They know that a residential last mile gigabit+ connection is not the best place for it. There's outliers and exceptions of course, but they're getting even rarer every year as a percentage of the total customers (eg: someone who wants to run a torrent seedbox from their house or something).

zamadatix

9 months ago

Agreed. I think the most underrated feature of PON is the ability to run future generations simultaneously on the same line, without any impact at all to the existing install. The bandwidth on SM fiber is so enormous it will pretty much always (for my lifetime at least) leave other wavelengths open. This allows for deploying 25G-PON on the same fiber as existing 10G-PON with no negative impact to the existing customers. That's huuuuge in terms of long term operations budget and upgrade logistics.

matrix_overload

9 months ago

Google is sadly known for doing cool proof-of-concept stuff with no regard for profitability, and then axing it when the hype is over.

cavisne

9 months ago

Im not sure Google is GPON (or has passive splitters at all). They were very early to deployments, and their plans are always symmetrical (which doesnt make sense for any standard *PON deployment).

wmf

9 months ago

It is PON. When the underlying network is 2.4 down, 1.2 up you can offer 1/1 plans (with some degree of prayer).

condiment

9 months ago

This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The last mile isn’t the same as today. Docsis technology continues to improve, more RF channels are being allocated to high speed internet, and cable companies are wholesale replacing their CMTS infrastructure with higher frequency (read: more channels) equipment.

The truth is that only some cable companies make these investments - you can look up “fiber node size” for respective performance across different companies. A fiber node being the place where optical is terminated and switched to coax. These have been getting smaller everywhere, but it only makes sense to invest there when the upstream infrastructure can support it. So from a consumer perspective, your “Linux isos” will be slow to download in any case until the upstream network is upgraded and your node is split to offer higher performance.

walrus01

9 months ago

> This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

I know, and you know, that the people doing the more serious engineering for DOCSIS based cable last mile segments are well aware of the limitations of the tech. What I was saying is that they are milking every last dollar of ROI out of the existing physical plant because overbuilding your entire network with XGSPON (it would be dumb to do 2.5G PON in 2024/2025) is a very capital intensive endeavour.

The shareholder value and profits of the company are increased in the short term by continuing to do copper as long as possible, even at the cost of thousands of unhappy customers dragging your company's name into the mud.

It's the fundamental business model problem, and executives at big dinosaur coax operator telecoms that have made the decision to do it this way as long as possible, until the coax/oversubcription situation becomes completely untenable in an area, or until a real XGSPON operator (maybe Lumen, or Ziply, or similar) which overlaps with your historical cable tv network rolls out a better product and you have no choice but to spend the money to keep up with the local competition.

You and I also know that no matter how much they mess about with DOCSIS3.1 and channel sizes and different RF configurations, the aggregate capacity of a few strands of fiber (using even the lowest cost and most rudimentary WDM) is much greater than RF over coax. Squeezing 2048/4096QAM RF stuff into coax is polishing the brass doorknobs on the titanic. It's not a viable long term solution!

wmf

9 months ago

Cable is definitely shared but CMTSes added bandwidth management features years ago. Cox could just slow down the "hogs" but they're too lazy/incompetent or they're using really old equipment.

daemonologist

9 months ago

Went and looked at some FCC maps to fantasize about having ISP competition after reading, and it turns out North Dakota has the best fiber coverage in the US, followed by South Dakota. I assume it's a combination of government subsidies and the prevalence of telephone co-ops out there, but very interesting nonetheless.

FCC Map - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/location-summary/fixed?version=...

Vice article - https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-north-dakota-has-the-bes...

New America article - https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/united-states-broadba...

zer8k

9 months ago

Very familiar with Cox as they are the only cable provider in my area and fiber largely has not made it to any other part of the city except the really new and wealthy areas.

While I have not yet run into any caps with my gigabit plan I am painfully aware of how limited the so called "unlimited" gigabit plan is. During COVID it was particularly egregious. I was paying about what Mike was paying except from the hours of 11am to around 9pm my download would be capped at 10Mbps or so and my upload halved from whatever it is to around 2Mbps. Cox didn't have the common courtesy to tell anyone that they were QoSing entire city blocks because their "infrastructure couldn't handle it". I only learned this by isolating the network and running my own tests. After what felt like 30 escalations with their tech support and a large portion of my night they all but confirmed they were doing this to handle the "streaming services". I work from home - this was a major problem. Despite this I was simply upsold yet another super-duper plan rather than given anything I could work with.

I get regular outages with them and run my own tests on the coax. Despite having noise levels that are pretty good for the most part their service still doesn't work right all the time. Despite my insistence calling a tech out their labyrinthine tech support tree all but prevents you from talking to anyone but a moron with a flowchart where all roads lead to "reset the modem" or "upsell hardware" and a hands free phone.

I used to run my own modem as I prefer to control my hardware. When I upgraded to gigabit years ago I was forced to lease a modem from them as prior to this they refused to service my house with third party hardware installed. All problems were always blamed on my modem, or my router, or anything they could point to that wasn't them. Dealing with their technical support or on-call techs was worse than pulling teeth. It was like performing dental surgery with a sledgehammer.

I won't get into what it was like cancelling my cable TV. Yet another mess made more complicated by the same situation. At least it was easy to drop off the set-top boxes at the local store.

I hate the amount of control ISPs have over us with the last-mile laws. Companies like Cox can more-or-less do whatever they want in my town because they're the biggest players with the most pipes. The result is as expected - terrible service, fine print bear traps, and high cost.

saxonww

9 months ago

I'm in the same city as Mike and have been a Cox customer for 15+ years. While I have had problems, for the most part I've been satisfied. I've not historically been a top-speed-tier customer though. They are running some kind of promotion right now where they've moved me from 500Mbps to 1Gbps for 12 months at no charge, and it's the first time where I've not gotten really anywhere close to the advertised speed (not even 500, now). I'm not sure what this accomplishes for them; maybe they'll cut speeds in half next year and try to suggest I just got accustomed to faster speeds.

Support is challenging when you need it. You usually have to talk to multiple people before your problem is resolved. For example, last time I got a new modem I had to be handed off twice before I got to a level where they could 'reset my registration,' and I definitely got the figurative stink eye over the phone for not renting their modem (which, is probably why it didn't "just work"). They usually try to sell you something like wiring insurance as well, and really like to emphasize the potential cost to you if they feel like they have to roll a truck. Fortunately, I've only had perhaps 3 support engagements (1 truck) in that 15+ years. Otherwise I'd be a lot less satisfied.

I'm hopeful that the various fiber providers 'coming soon to my area' will help with this. AT&T is here but not cheaper - they force you to rent their equipment - and I don't want to be an AT&T customer. At the very least it might stop Cox from raising rates $3-$6 a year.

OptionOfT

9 months ago

Cox in general is horrible. Their caps are 1.25TB, even on 1 and 2 Gigabit connections.

And it's not like they put you on slow speeds once you expire it, no, they charge you $10 per 50GB (!). Automatically. You cannot opt out.

Oh, and their counter isn't real-time...

kev009

9 months ago

The wholesale price of bandwidth is so low, I can't really understand this as anything other than BOFH-esqe behavior by the network planners, but maybe there is some path to a poorly executed attempt to eventually shakedown customers. Beyond the transit fees, its hard to imagine them struggling to backhaul with modern fiber optic data rates and the cable industry has always been a leader in fiber backhaul. Beyond all that, the protocols will almost certainly do the right thing.

Further, having a ton of eyeballs pulling downstream gives Cox a ton of leverage in negotiating settlement-free peering that for instance a pure wholesale carrier would not have. Cox is also a carrier, so the eyeballs are valuable beyond just their subscription fees.

toofy

9 months ago

with the ftc finally going after companies lately i really hope they go after these companies who make up entirely new meanings for words.

for example, it’s crazy to me that we allowed companies to redefine “unlimited” to mean “limited”.

when people pontificate on how we seem to be heading towards dangerous levels of low trust society—this is a great place to start. few things reach as many people as marketing. we can’t trust so much of what we’re being sold. that’s not good, at all.

whatever1

9 months ago

They always have the choice to change provihahahahahhaha.

I am kidding, Cox is probably their only choice. They better write a letter to apologize as a neighborhood for their bad behavior.

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9 months ago

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tensility

9 months ago

Why has this 4 year old article bubbled to the top of HN?

majorchord

9 months ago

I could only dream of having 10mbps upload... we are still stuck on DSL here, I am lucky to get close to 1mb upload, not enough to even watch my home camera feed reliably, especially with audio on.

Loughla

9 months ago

During covid my local ISP got a grant to run rural fiber. We went from satellite to a full gig fiber connection. It has literally changed my home life.

jhenkens

9 months ago

Any more context on this? We've got copper AT&T DSL as our only option, besides Starlink. Have been trying to work with the county, look for grants, etc to present to a local ISP who's mentioned interest.

Loughla

9 months ago

So I know part of the money was through the state. It was matching funds for federal dollars. I think it was through rural development, which is closed, but I'm not absolutely sure. I'll check with my neighbor (works for ISP) tomorrow to see if he knows.

To be honest, we approached the ISP, who was offering fiber in a town 45 minutes away. They said if we could get sign ups at least every half mile, on average, they would make it happen. We had the signatures when they got the grant, so it was sort of a wasted effort on our part.

I'll message here tomorrow if I figure it out though.

jhenkens

9 months ago

Thanks! Yeah, we have a local ISP that has laid fiber in other communities where they could get grants (namely native communities), but they are only doing WISP in our community right now, and it won't service about half the homes here.

Loughla

9 months ago

I confirmed that the majority of the funding was through federal rural development grants that aren't open anymore. Sorry about that! Now it's just low interest loans that are available to isp's.

What state are you in? There are quite a number of state grants, depending on where you are.

For real though. Talk to one of their planners and see if they have a number of necessary sign-ups. We did a signature campaign and had what we needed before the grant existed. They had committed to our stretch of fiber before they had the grant, we just had to all sign contacts for services. It took a year or so of knocking on doors. And that was to run the line about 40 miles.

willcipriano

9 months ago

Starlink?

majorchord

9 months ago

Absolutely not. And there's too many trees for any satellite service anyways

MindSpunk

9 months ago

Why? Outside of disdain for the moron who owns SpaceX? The service is fantastic (for me, anyway) at a great price barely more expensive than a comparable fibre connection that I can't get anyway. Limits of geography are fair, but it seems that's not the primary reason.

cavisne

9 months ago

Article is from 2020, when there was a big load increase from WFH.

They way HFC (cable internet) works you would have to cap upload speed for everyone on the network, as it uses time multiplexing for uploads.

mh-

9 months ago

This isn't true, they could create a new config with the lower upload speed and only push it to the offenders modems.

No different than when they change their speed plans and roll out new tiers.

ddtaylor

9 months ago

A reminder of why we are getting FTC broadband labels: https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

toast0

9 months ago

Labels aren't going to help when you don't have choices, and most people don't have choices.

Just like prop 65 warnings don't help when everything has them.

ddtaylor

9 months ago

They will at the least not be able to claim unlimited data as easily since the label is required to differentiate between unlimited and throttled service.

kylehotchkiss

9 months ago

Cox (coaxial) is the only real viable ISP for me, in southern California, in a neighborhood built 25 years ago. Nobody wants to lay fiber in the neighborhood. A neighborhood with nearly 2,000 houses. If Cox wasn't around... we'd probably all have fios. I had faster, cheaper fiber a decade ago at my house in no-name Virginia city and while living aboard a few years in asia. So frustrating.

sadler315

9 months ago

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tencentshill

9 months ago

It's fascinating, "lord bubuza" is found all over different forums. I wonder why more spam filters don't have that keyword blocked.

sadler315

9 months ago

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JohnMakin

9 months ago

man, as much as I hate spectrum, I will say, as much as I want to pay them for bandwidth and speed they’ll give me what I want, and sometimes even more. YMMV of course. imho this is why net neutrality should be a thing.

walrus01

9 months ago

The engineering problem here is in limitation in aggregate Mbps/Gbps capacity in a specific last-mile service segment for N number of end user residential customers, due to use of DOCSIS3 on coax vs more modern FTTH access methods. Nothing to do with peering/net neutrality at the local city's IX point or how the ISP exchanges traffic with other AS.

BrandoElFollito

9 months ago

We only have unlimited access on France but the speed is never guaranteed. It is always "up to ..." and usually asymmetric.

I have a 2.5 Gbps link which I would never saturate continuously no matter what because I have generic equipment at home (despite self-hosting a lot).

I tried a few times to saturate it and whatever I managed to pull was never slow. This is probably because the ISPs allocate some realistic amount of people to the group of people who use the 10 Gbps provided to that group.

zoezoezoezoe

9 months ago

As unfortunate as it is, ISPs are really in the business of scamming and monopolizing the market, lest we talk about how ISPs robbed nationwide fiber from us. ISPs dont want to charge for usage, because then they wouldnt get their ransom, but since they scam average users, those who put their claims to the test are punished.

komali2

9 months ago

Privatizing infrastructure clearly isn't working. It's time to nationalize. Cox is basically a mafia at this point, able to sell "service" and then threaten you to use the service in some arbitrary way, but keep paying btw or you get nothing.

hi-v-rocknroll

9 months ago

I get 250 Mbps download and 2 Mbps upload on Spectrum (Charter Communications) in semi-rural Texas for $60/month. (I'm itching to switch to GVEC.) Recently, I had Google Fiber 2 Gbps symmetric with an option for 5 and 8 Gbps with a trial for 20 Gbps.

zoezoezoezoe

9 months ago

I posted this on Reddit yesterday and I think it applies here

"If your ISP isnt in the business of servicing internet, they should rethink their business model"

kkfx

9 months ago

Formal complaint for false advertisement and contractual breach, nothing strange.

Mistletoe

9 months ago

I remember when we got Cox “Fiber” that wasn’t fiber at all. This company is absolute trash.

https://www.lightreading.com/cable-technology/cox-called-out...

https://www.cox.com/residential/internet.html

somethoughts

9 months ago

I think if the company could offer Fiber To The Curb and then the last 10-20 feet between the curb and the house's router was either DSL or Cable or 5G, that would ba huge win.

FTTC would avoid this scenario at least where a heavy user brings down the whole neighborhood.

But perhaps the bandwidth through the last 10 feet of DSL/cable/5G isn't enough to upsell customers to convince them the switch or modem equipment is too big to fit at the curb.

Dylan16807

9 months ago

Coax can certainly handle a short dedicated link. Or you could run an Ethernet cable into the house. Phone wiring I'd doubt the capacity, and wireless would cost the most and work badly.

walrus01

9 months ago

For many years the Canadian ILEC Telus branded its last mile copper based ASDL2+ and VDSL2 products (10 Mbps to 100 Mbps, approximately) as "Optik" with lots of marketing images of fiber optic cables, when it was of course anything but. The DSLAM would have a fiber uplink, sure, but definitely not the last mile.

fat_cantor

9 months ago

A year ago, I had fast Cox internet for $70 per month. I moved a mile away, and Cox wanted at least $233 for any connection at any speed because AT&T was not a competitor in that neighborhood. I said no and relied on 5G until AT&T moved in a few months later with the $70 market rate. When business people take control of companies from engineers, we get enshittification. Cox has somehow managed to make me nostalgic for the enshittification phase, which has morphed into this logjammin phase where no one even pretends to be competent enough to fix the cable.

maxlin

9 months ago

what a bunch of Cox

CatWChainsaw

9 months ago

"Thank you for paying us to use our service, now stop using our service, we just want free money."

user

9 months ago

[deleted]

h2odragon

9 months ago

this isn't going to be fully effective until they name and shame.

little popups (like viasat did) that say something like "your internet will continue to suck until your neighbor at $address stops torrenting the 100gb h0rse archive"

and then they can get extra fees for "anonymous" as well as "unlimited"...

alistairSH

9 months ago

Or Cox can tell users what the limits are and cut off only those that exceed the limits. Punishing a whole region for one heavy user is ridiculous.

zer8k

9 months ago

Or alternatively they could take some of their record profits and upgrade their 30 year old infrastructure. The modern world is internet-enabled and these people are the ones with their foot on the hose selling water.

ryandrake

9 months ago

You mean, potentially have shareholders and executives get slightly less money? Preposterous! How would they afford their Aspen home or yacht in Monaco?

alt187

9 months ago

I can't wait for this future.

dylan604

9 months ago

Like HoAs weren't already annoying. In this future, the ISPs will deputize the HoAs to have roaving bands of enforcers going door to door to encourage considerate bandwidth practices. Eventually, this will be escalated to authorized drone strikes on the offending addresses. So it will behoove you to ensure your neighbors are not borrowing your bandwidth.

stonethrowaway

9 months ago

> name and shame

Can’t tell if this is serious or not. People here are doing basement and house work without any permits, without any gas line indicators, while being filmed. Neighbors are leaving because they fear a gas line puncture will lead to an explosion. The city won’t bother addressing it. Nobody, absolutely nobody gives a single infinitesimal fuck about a pipsqueak neighbor “naming and shaming” them over download limits. Laughable.