I think my conception of basic tech illiteracy among the general public is vastly wrong. I generally like to believe most people are competent enough to handle these sorts of things.
But really, internet (and digital TV) services are pervasive enough that they are no longer just for technologically inclined and resourceful people. All aspects of society are now using the internet, even the homeless, impoverished, disabled, and institutionalized.
With fiber, the ISP can see that everything is good up to the GPON terminal. Probably the router too as most customers will just use the ISP provided one. So that leaves the ethernet interface / wifi card as the only thing that would fail and have to be ascertained over the phone, and with a local ISP its probably more cost effective to cut out all the abstractions and just have a tech stop by to check it out.
On the other side, customers have become a lot more used to self help. For example their email isn't even hosted with the ISP any more! I would think that most people would be aware that if a device works good close to the router, and not good far, the issue is wifi range. If they're still calling the ISP, you can direct them towards wifi extenders. Or if device A does not work but device B does, it's not a problem to call the ISP about. And so on.
Of course this is my idyllic view not having worked ISP tech support in a few decades...
This leads to fun tech support calls if you use your own equipment where you're basically proving to the support underling that you know how to run your equipment for the first 20-30 minutes before they take your issue seriously (yes, the modem light is green, yes, I've already power-cycled, yes, I'm testing on a wired connection, etc)
For analyzing support burden, I think the relevant question here is why have you even had the experience of calling tech support for a non-working connection - and that falls squarely on the non-reliability of Comcast's network.
Called them to ask why, and they said it was a planned outage. When was it planned, I asked? 17 minutes ago.
https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...
Now I just use my own customer modem.
I usually speedrun this by telling them something like: I am hardwired to the modem and seeing T4s in the log.
> Please wait a moment while I check on some things on your account.
> Thank you for your patience. Can you please confirm for me that you see a green light on the top of the device? Can you tell me whether the light is blinking or is solid?
There were things that made the ISP I worked at special, one of them being that we pretty much defaulted to having customers hook up their own DSL, which meant spending a lot of call time helping people who have no idea what an RJ11 jack is install plugs and adapters.
I've also spent a lot of time on "the password I use for my email doesn't work on my Facebook" and "my USB printer doesn't work". People don't know who to call for tech support so they try their ISP. There was also the occasional "the internet is broken" whenever the user's home page had a different theme or design as well, those usually came in waves.
Once the modem and/or router is installed, most internet services Just Work. There are outages and bad modems and the occasional bad software update to deal with, but they're a relatively low call volume compared to what customers call about.
Back when I still had ISPs that provided the modem + router, every single issue I think I ever had fell into one of two categories: a modem and/or router power cycle fixed it, or it was a broader network issue that had nothing to do with me or my particular internet situation (this is omitting the most common third issue: terrible customer service problems, but that's a separate thing)
Also, as the other commenter pointed out, ISPs don't terminate their service at the edge of your premises. Basically all of them today will connect one of your devices to confirm installation.
Also I could save them a bunch of money getting rid of services they don't use, like moving their landlines to VOIP.
For example, if you subscribe to Verizon FiOS voice, the technician will disconnect your copper phone lines and connect them to VoIP termination on your ONT.
You call an electrician or a handyman or somebody and tell them you have some low voltage work.
The ISP provides a cable box and modem to most homes in the same way that the electric company sticks a meter on your wall.
In the US, most do. This is a standard part of "in home installation" when first subscribing to service for all of the major providers in the US.
Example: https://forums.xfinity.com/conversations/customer-service/sc...
With careful selection of the customer ONU/ONT, the incidence of support calls means that it can be weeks between customer issues on smaller networks. These days my biggest support headache is in house wireless coverage. It's also the one part of internet service that most people are unwilling to invest even small amounts of money to improve. The worst are the folks that install outdoor wireless security cameras without thinking ahead to putting them on a dedicated network to avoid driving up airtime usage and congesting the main wireless AP.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg
2020 NANOG:
It's disgusting that big telecom has been able to monopolize so much of the US for so long.
AT&T put an optic cable at my curb 10 years ago (most likely due to imminent competition from Google Fiber internet), but then never lit it (most likely because Google dropped their effort due to complications with cities)…
For me personally, I work on networking startup so I'd like to be able to run IPv6 stack from my home network to test things.
I recently moved into Menlo Park and had no problems getting 2.5Gbps from ATT fiber.
I have been a customer for 14 years now. Would love to move to higher bandwidth.
There's a huge gap between "had the idea" and "had all the technical skills, the $millions in capital, and the managerial ability to actually build it". Then there's the barrier of "and succeed". If you read between the article's lines a bit - these guys had loads of the first 3, yet they're still losing loads of money every month.
But, bigger picture, you have a good point. These articles are obviously cherry-picked stories, with an extremely optimistic "... and the little guy wins!" spin. Ars is writing for an audience of techies who are frustrated with crappy ISP's.
The worst part appears to be the physical wiring. If your government has implemented loop unbundling, you're already set (probably need to do some bureaucracy and pay some affordable-at-a-stretch fees to get access to it). Otherwise, or if the loops are just crap, you have to figure out how to physically get a cable to everywhere, a task that is fundamentally laborious and legally fraught, not nerdy at all (unless lawyers are nerds) so nobody wants to do it.
Wireless ISPs are about as popular because of this. Wireless service is always worse, but you only have to install plant (physical infrastructure) at the customer's house and one central location, not all the places leading up to the customer's house. This makes it a whole lot more amenable to individual-nerd or handful-of-nerds setup.
I encourage everyone to at least think about how they would do it.
It's pretty good - their provided router is locked down to hell and they're on a cgnat, but not having to deal with Comcast's 1.2tb data cap is well worth it. Checking Comcast's site now, it seems that they now offer "unlimited" data. Interesting, that option wasn't there 6 months ago.
~100 customers seems too small for the amount of effort they have put in so far. They've been working along all the roads near me for about a year, and they're out there running fiber conduit every day. The houses out here are far apart. Hopefully, they can make it work.
It's been there since they announced the data cap. I thought the unlimited bundled with leasing their higher end hardware came first, but the email from 2016 announcing that our plan was getting the cap mentions being able to pay for unlimited.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
A comcast customer always had the option to pay for unlimited data. I get that part. What is the 2nd part? “Started offering it as standard” means what?
There's barely any competition here. You can pretty much chose from Comcast Business or XFinity, which both are just Comcast because of a free market with free as in not in jail.
This sounds like mine. I'm guessing yours doesn't support IPv6 because most fiber providers don't.
For the router, I already build firewalls so that. I pay $10/mo to escape their cgnat.
I've also alerted them to expect regular haranguing from me about deploying IPv6. Especially since bgp.he.net shows they have a /40 allocated to themselves; it doesn't seem to be used.
Yeah, what's up with that? I just got switched on to fiber and the CGNAT for IPv4 doesn't shock me much, but what's with the no IPv6 in 2025?
I know enough to deal with it, but what's the deal? Is there something systematic here?
I get the impression that they are still learning to run an ISP, both technically and customer facingly. It's weird - I learned more about them from this article than from actually being living here with them.
Some people will say monitoring is all that you need, but I do not agree. There are a million different little issues that can and do occur on physical networks in the real world, and there's no way monitoring will have a 99% chance of detecting all of them. When incidents like the partial Microsoft network outage that hit certain peering points occurred, I had to route around the damage by tweaking route filtering on the core routers to prefer a transit connection that worked over the lower cost peering point. It's that kind of oddball issue that active users catch and report which does not happen for barely used services like IPv6.
CPE support for IPv6 has generally been garbage with it taking 15-20 years before the bare minimum was supported by mainstream router vendors. Even today there are still vendors that assume only IPv4 support. In my opinion the IETF really screwed up when they made IPv6 more complicated than just IPv4 with more address bits. The incumbent in my area generally uses PPPoE in their access network, but routers that supported PPPoE and prefix delegation basically didn't exist in 2010, and only started being available circa 2015 (in part due to the required bits not existing in OpenWRT and the hardware vendors' software development kits for their chipsets). Sure, we're 10 years further on now, but there remain a number of vendors that only support IPv4 for management of devices (cough Ubiquiti cough) in parts of their product line.
That said, there are features of IPv6 that are absolutely awesome for carriers. The next header feature that pretty much eliminates the need for MPLS in an IPv6 transport network is one such item that makes building transport networks so much cleaner when using IPv6 than IPv4. No more header insertion or rewriting, just update one field and fix up the delta on the checksum and CRC. They just aren't really applicable for smaller networks.
How many ask for IPv4? I understand your situation, it's a lot of work, for something that many won't notice. It's just that saying there's no demand because your average consumer, who also doesn't know what IPv4 is, isn't asking for it, is the mentality that keeps IPv6 from being implemented.
On the funnier side of things, we've also sometimes run into the opposite problem that we can't reproduce an issue, because it's only on IPv4 and 95% of the time everything we do is IPv6. But we're also not serving home users.
Some applications want to open ports and don't have the server-side infrastructure to punch a hole through NAT. Especially P2P apps and some games.
Sometimes I want to run a small, low-traffic web server from home.
Sometimes I'm connecting to my network from a machine that I don't control and can't install Tailscale on.
The only thing in the end their salespeople could do was offer TV bundles but still wasn't cost-competitive. Not sure what their offerings are now but it was such an easy decision to switch.
Isn’t this standard competitive practice ? Charge what the market will bear.
I don’t know if I’d call that “exploitation”. If there’s one gas station 90 miles from every other gas station in the Nevada desert, they’re gonna charge more, aren’t they?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/stung-by-custome...
From the article, it sounds like the "default" option is for the customer to supply their own router, which I appreciate:
> Prime-One provides a modem and the ONT, plus a Wi-Fi router if the customer prefers not to use their own router.
As far as I know, nobody uses separate boxes for the modem and router, that kind of thinking died when wifi became more widespread and included by default with ISP plans.
Definitely splitting hairs here though on terminology.
My fiber installer referred to the Adtran 632V ONT he installed as the "modem".
He installed two other junction boxes (one outside the house near/under where the fiber attaches to the wall of the house, one inside near the ONT) but they're just passive optical couplers allowing them to swap out fiber segments in the event of fiber damage without re-running the entire install.
So not actually better than Comcast, just bad in a different way.
This indicates that their local and state governments aren't (at this time) captured by the incumbent cable provider.
A captured state gov will pass laws to thwart new infra deployment, commonly written by ISP interests. A captured local gov will never approve deployment or slow-walk permitting in an attempt to bankrupt the upstart.
more explainers: New suburban fiber infrastructure means either trenching or pole hanging. The local gov issues permits for both but poles also require the cooperation of the pole owners. This last adds the PSC to the mix.
Recalcitrant pole owners are known to stall and kill infrastructure deployment - especially where going underground isn't an option. Some PSCs mandate that pole owners cooperate. Some PSCs abdicate that responsibility and are examples of regulatory capture.
Pro poles / open air:
- very, VERY cheap and fast to build out with GPON. That's how you got 1/1 GBit fiber in some piss poor village in the rural ditches of Romania.
- easy to get access when you need to do maintenance
Con poles / open air:
- it looks fucking ugly. Many a nice photo from Romania got some sort of half assed fiber cable on it.
- it's easy for drunk drivers, vandals (for the Americans: idiots shooting birds that rest on aboveground lines [1][2]), sabotage agents or moronic cable thieves to access and damage infrastructure
Pro trench digging:
- it's incredibly resilient. To take out electricity and power, you need a natural disaster at the scale of the infamous Ahrtal floods that ripped through bridges carrying cables and outright submerged and thus ruined district distribution networking rooms, but even the heaviest hailstorm doesn't give a fuck about cable that's buried. Drunk drivers are no concern, and so are cable thieves or terrorists.
- it looks way better, especially when local governments go and re-surface the roads afterwards
Cons trench digging:
- it's expensive, machinery and qualified staff are rare
- you usually need lots more bureaucracy with permits, traffic planning or what not else that's needed to dig a trench
- when something does happen below ground, it can be ... challenging to access the fault.
- in urban or even moderately settled areas, space below ground can be absurdly congested with existing infrastructure that necessitates a lot of manual excavation instead of machinery. Gas, water, sewers, long decommissioned pipe postal service lines, subways, low voltage power, high voltage power, other fiber providers, cable TV...
[1] https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/illegal-shoo...
when i got this far I literally thought you were making a joke about Poland.
For anyone starting out today, I would strongly recommend having a planned legal / regulatory strategy to fall back on in the event that excessive delays occur by parties you cannot avoid dealing with.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.
> Comcast seems to have noticed, Herman said. "They've been calling our clients nonstop to try to come back to their service, offer them discounted rates for a five-year contract and so on," he said.
go figure. their monopoly/duopoly has ended, profits dropping like a rock in area, and now they want to compete.
Only billionaires and people fooled by Peter Thiel think competition is evil.
Optimum had their entire service area bought out by Comcast the day after I switched. Comcast has since broken every major utility at least twice and my fiber connection three times by working on the old infrastructure. I think Optimum won that trade. I can't imagine many residents are going to prefer Comcast over $80/m for no-bullshit internet, especially after the water main break they caused last week.
These FTTP providers have the game solved in Texas. I've seen them do 500-1000 homes in <30 days. Their directional drilling expertise and aggressive neglect for 811 seem to get things done very quickly. There are some areas with competing fiber providers now. I've got 5gbps symmetric for $110/m and I live in the woods. Trees go through power lines and the fiber infra is completely unaffected. The only utility left to bury is the electricity, and they're actively working on that in some areas now.
I wish it was a bit cheaper, but someone has to fund that trip to Mars.
My parents live in a small, countryside village. They have fiber at the same prices (including 4Gbit symmetric, though they are happy with a cheap 200Mbit subscription).
> I also occasionally rsync large directories to/from cloud storage and that can also saturate
For convenience, the rclone tool is nice for most cloud storage like google and stuff that make rsync annoying[0]
rsync also offers compression[1], and you might want to balance it depending if you want to be CPU bound or IO bound. You can pick the compression and level, with more options than just the `-z` flag. You can also increase speed by not doing the checksum, or by running without checksum and then running again later with. Or some intervaling like daily backups without and monthly you do checksums.
If you tar your files up first I have a function that is essentially `tar cf - "${@:2}" | xz -9 --threads $NTHREADS --verbose > "${1}"` which uses the maximum `xz` compression level. I like to heavily compress things upstream because it also makes downloads faster and decompression is much easier than compression. I usually prefer being compute bound.
Also, a systemd job is always nice and offers more flexibility than cron. It's what's helped me most with the wack-a-mole game. I like to do on calendar events (e.g. Daily, Weekly) and add a random delay. It's also nice that if the event was missed because the machine was off it'll run the job once the machine is back on (I usually make it wait at least 15 minutes after machine comes online).
Great tips! I'll definitely be using your tar command
Let's take video streaming. I have a pretty compressed version of Arrival that's at 2GB and is a 4k movie ~2hrs long (the original file was ~2x the size). To stream that we need to do 2000Mb / (3600s * 2) = 277.8Mb/s. This also doesn't account for any buffering. This is one of my smaller 4k videos and more typical is going to be 3Gb-5Gb (e.g. Oppenheimer vs Children of Men). Arrival is pretty dark and a slow movie so great for compression.
Now, there's probably some trickery going on that can get better savings and you'll see used with things like degrading the quality. You could probably drop this down to 1.5Gb and have no major visual hits or you can do a variable streaming and drop this even more. On many screens you might not notice a huge difference between 1440 and 4k, and depending on the video, maybe even 1080p and 4k[0].
For comparison, I loaded up a 4k YouTube video (which uses vp9 encoding) and monitored the bandwidth. It is very spiky, but frequently jumped between 150kbps and 200Mbps. You could probably do 2 people on this. I think it'd get bogged down with 4 people. And remember, this is all highly variable. Games, downloads, and many other things can greatly impact all this. It also highly depends on the stability of your network connection. You're paying for *UP TO* 300Mbps, not a fixed rate of 300Mbps. Most people want a bit of headroom.
[0] Any person will 100% be able to differentiate 1080p and 4k when head to head, but in the wild? We're just too used to spotty connections and variable resolutions. It also depends on the screen you're viewing from, most importantly the screen size (e.g. phone).
First, if it was 2GB * 2 for the source of your recompressed copy, that's 4GB * 8 bits per byte = 32 Gigabits (Gb), or 32,000Mb. Two hours in seconds is 60 * 60 * 2 = 7,200 seconds.
32,000 / 7,200 is 4.444Mb/s. Streaming your 2 hour long 4GB movie could be done with ~5Mbit. A 1Gb/s connection could handle streaming ~200 of these movies.
Going back to Blu-rays as a source, an Ultra HD Blu-ray maxes out at 144Mbit but in reality most movies are encoded at a much lower bitrate. Most movies will cap out around 40-50Mbit. You could do 20 of these straight Blu-ray movies on a 1Gb connection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_HD_Blu-ray#Specification...
It's not a committed rate. Your individual line is a gigabit, but the upstream from your whole block is 10 gigabit so you can't all use it at once. Your guaranteed rate is probably have more like 20-50 Mbps, if that's what's confusing you. But it's extremely rare that everyone tries to use their gigabit all at once.
If it's a Passive Optical Network, you might be sharing a gigabit download with your block - you all share the same fiber - and you get substantially less than a gigabit upload due to the need for timeslotting. Gigabit PON is obsolete though, now you'd get at least 10G PON.
ipython•4h ago
Hell if there's a way to invest in Prime-One, these guys seem to have their stuff together...
LoganDark•3h ago
Those are all telecom providers. It makes sense that they'd love wireless because they already have cellular infrastructure.