I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter’s shitlist to this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to wait for the line to become available again. No amount of technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with their infrastructure.
So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer.
They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3.
Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
These days you get a lot better result from any company if you take a few minutes, find the email of a few VPs in the target company, and write the execs directly.
Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.
If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.
I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally fixed it was to upgrade to business-class service, complain to business support, and they sent a tech who eventually found what it was (a tester on the line painted over so as to nearly be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to consumer DSL.
My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier this year, end of contract came up.
I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was showing up in advertising on the same road family business is on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site. Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete. Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location went from 300/20 to 300/300.
Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared to buy my own modems. Thankfully it’s been pretty reliable, better than the power utility (especially since comcast will literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in extended outages).
Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights which would be on a timer and cause chaos).
This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests.
I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs.
Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times). So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for Xfinity.
Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than his requirements, for one.
I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141’s that stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed ‘upgrade’ that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units same problem. I’m the problem using old modems says reddit. DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more sympathetic, but I still couldn’t get a tech that could do anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183 which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds.
After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service.
And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
I've had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample, I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't service it.
Certainly, there's problems in some part of the network, and getting past level 1 tech support is hard. Physical security is pretty much unlikely. That said, I don't think those boxes are going to take much abuse to open even if they are locked.
There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.
I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.
But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.
I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it.
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems.
your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting.
3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace.
coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized.
nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it.
the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.
I sympathize with the author. I remain on Charter’s shitlist to this day because I had a very similar issue about twenty years ago, except our connection cut out entirely after ~10MB of data had downloaded in a continuous stream, and the cable modem had to wait for the line to become available again. No amount of technical documentation, logs, traceroutes, equipment swaps, or anything on my end would convince them it was a problem with their infrastructure.
So, exasperated, I filed a complaint with the FCC. A week later, it got fixed along with an apology, no truck roll needed.
I miss when the government had teeth and used it against companies, man.
The comment at the bottom of the article I believe is correct. I believe this because our neighborhood had the same problem. One day my neighbor, frustrated beyond his capacity, and seemingly very high on something, went outside and started ripping infrastructure out by hand and damaging everything else he could find with a hammer.
They came out and replaced a lot of the damaged equipment and did a few upgrades. After that the intermittent 2 minute drop problems disappeared.
I was merely pretty sure that the comment was AI generated as I read it. After reading it, I became a lot more confident when I noticed the username above the comment: Gemini 3.
Is this a Wordpress plugin the blog author is using?
Amazing that we now live in a world where AI can instantly an accurately diagnose a network infrastructure problem, but you are still forced to talk to CS drones who tell you again and again "have you tried unplugging it and plugging it back in?"
I'm not so sure that's an accurate diagnosis. But I agree it's certainly better than one can get from phoning support.
I had a similar problem with a different ISP, Optimum, in Northern NJ. It wasn't as regular as the author's problem -- my cable modem would desync intermittently throughout the day despite the signal strength numbers being in spec.
I replaced everything downstream of the drop from the street, all new wiring inside, a new modem/router/etc. All signs pointed to the problem being outside the house. I went so far as to connect an oscilloscope to the coax line to look for patterns. I discovered that if I physically manipulated a particular section of the line from the pole, a huge interference pattern appeared and the modem's connection dropped. Eventually I could reproduce the connection loss fairly easily.
Convincing the ISP to actually do anything about it was much harder. Despite first-hand evidence that the coax from the pole needed to be replaced, their tech support insisted that someone had to come into the house to inspect the interior wiring. No amount of insistence on my part would convince them that it was not necessary. The building was a vacation home, and this was during peak COVID time, so there was basically no chance of that happening. The appointment came with threats of service charges if they sent a tech and could not enter the building or reproduce the problem, so I cancelled it.
Coincidentally, I happened to discover that the mayor of the town had started a hotline specifically for reporting home Internet problems in the town. So I sent in a message to that service, not really expecting anything to come of it. But shortly after I get a phone call from some higher-up department of the ISP. They had a truck out within a few days to replace the drop -- with no one home -- and the connection was rock solid ever since.
This experience taught me that ISPs often have distinct support channels that governmental departments use to contact them. I think they called it the "executive support team" or something along those lines. Basically, if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support. Long story short, I think escalating this through the local or state level government may be the author's best shot at getting this resolved.
These days you get a lot better result from any company if you take a few minutes, find the email of a few VPs in the target company, and write the execs directly.
Exec fowards the email to the correct underling with "WTF?" added to it. You get phone calls the next day.
If OP is reading this, try downgrading to a Docsis 3.0 modem. Docsis 3.1 in Comcast’s deployed infrastructure has severe repeating outage issues when there’s a cracked line somewhere allowing RF leakage into it, that cause a partial 3.1 reset but have no effect on 3.0.
According to the article, it happens on a very specific set of intervals. That's not an RF issue. Downgrading/replacing the device isn't a solution.
I think that's probably why they downgraded his speed from 1200 to 700, in an attempt to avoid using the more sensitive channels.
The US gov't broke up AT&T and killed Bell Labs for this, so at least they owe us to bust this monopoly
I’ve dealt with this at least twice on behalf of clients. In both cases, another provider entering the market was the only thing that made a difference. By that point, they’d already burned all the good will they had in the area, so maybe they would have fixed things with competition, but I wouldn’t know, my clients got on the waitlist to jump ship the absolute nanosecond they hear about it.
I had a similar problem with a DSL line ages ago and what finally fixed it was to upgrade to business-class service, complain to business support, and they sent a tech who eventually found what it was (a tester on the line painted over so as to nearly be invisible). After it was fixed I was able to downgrade back to consumer DSL.
My most recent interaction with comcast business was earlier this year, end of contract came up.
I finally replaced the SB6183 with a Hitron CODA56 to be ready for midsplit upgrade (greatly improved upload speeds which was showing up in advertising on the same road family business is on). The way their sales works now is terrible, they chain you to a specific rep and that rep has to release you if you want to talk to anyone else. It took me something like 4 reps to finally get one that would sell me what I wanted, a no-term contract at list price without the firewall/spyware crap. No promotion requested. Just the 300mbps tier for that site. Nobody anywhere knew when midsplit upgrades would be complete. Thankfully about 2 months later it was done and that location went from 300/20 to 300/300.
Their business tier was better some years ago, now if I have a tech come out they try to charge me every time because I dared to buy my own modems. Thankfully it’s been pretty reliable, better than the power utility (especially since comcast will literally setup honda inverter gens to keep their nodes up in extended outages).
I had some luck contacting executives I found on LinkedIn when I had a similar issue with WOW.
Not definite imo to be some sort of cron job. More likely there is some sort of electromagnetic interference happening at that time (a classic one used to be cheap Christmas decoration lights which would be on a timer and cause chaos).
This person needs to get the actual DOCSIS diagnostic logs from the modem to figure out what's going on with the physical line, not just ping tests or speed tests.
Also, why wouldn't starlink be an alternative?
I doubt it's RF interference from something like christmas lights at those specific intervals for 17 months. Also, the author did provide DOCSIS diagnostic logs.
Even if it is RF interference, the problem is at the node level (because his neighbor has the same issues at the same times). So it's not his responsibility to figure out the problem for Xfinity.
Starlink is not an equivalent solution. It's much slower than his requirements, for one.
The author explains in the article they’re looking for gigabit service and Comcast is the only player in the area.
Not this bad of a situation but I’ve successfully gotten them to escalate to the network engineers who were able to help
Perhaps asking specifically to be escalated to or put in contact with a network engineer would be helpful
Or at least find one online and send him an email - sometimes they ignore you but sometimes they go out of their way to resolve your issue
I had to go through some stuff back in 2019 with Comcast business. I had Motorola (now arris) surfboard sb6141’s that stopped bonding upstream channels as soon as they were activated past walled garden. This was immediately after a speed ‘upgrade’ that turned into a downgrade on the upstream speeds. Two units same problem. I’m the problem using old modems says reddit. DSLreports (RIP, my oldest active account on the net) was more sympathetic, but I still couldn’t get a tech that could do anything. I liked the surfboard modems so I bought a 3rd sb6183 which was newer. Bonded, activated, as soon as it provisioned the upstream channels stopped bonding, back to junk upload speeds.
After a month of getting nowhere I CC’d Brian Roberts on the thread (suggested by dslreports) and received a call the next day from someone in engineering. They informed me that it was a corrupt boot file being sent with the (then) new speed tiers. Fixed that day. I think they credited 2 or 3 months of service for the hassle of buying multiple modems and having degraded service.
And uh, yeah. That experience and eventual success after was on my mind when I wrote the RCS post on front page a few days ago.
This has to be the weirdest post I've seen in a while? Cable infrastructure in the US is awful. I can't imagine a scenario where it would be reliable.
Yeah its pretty weird I created a website just to write this article just so I could make this post. I'm so frustrated with these outages :(
I've had pretty good luck everywhere I had cable internet, not much in the way of regular outages. Obviously a limited sample, I haven't lived too many places, but at least living where toast0 has lived is a scenario where cable internet is reliable. Not my current address though, cause Comcast won't service it.
Certainly, there's problems in some part of the network, and getting past level 1 tech support is hard. Physical security is pretty much unlikely. That said, I don't think those boxes are going to take much abuse to open even if they are locked.
There’s not much to break, honestly, and cable TV is still fairly popular outside of techy circles, but mostly it’s still the only option for broadband in a large portion of the US. I’ve been on Spectrum for several years, and it’s been largely trouble-free. I’m in a rural area of North Carolina, but near enough to Charlotte that they don’t have the entire region locked down. That said, Windstream/Kinetic is just now rolling out fiber in my area (should launch in the next few months), Spectrum has always been the only option for land-based broadband. I’ll switch to Kinetic for the symmetric upload speed, rather than any specific reliability problems we’ve experienced.
I’m sure these market conditions are common in most of the country, but without the moderating climate we have, so I imagine it’s much more susceptible to damage by freezing temperatures and natural disasters.
But the article is decrying the monopolies, and the bad incentives that they inevitably create, rather than attempting to highlight the poor state of telecommunications infrastructure.
I don’t think it was the author’s intent to shock us by the state of CATV infrastructure.
I'd start my own ISP for the area
I found that logging into the cable modem itself and getting the signal levels and modem event logs helps. The poster seems to just be logging IP reachability. You have to keep repeating that modem logs show the problem is outside of my house until they send a technician. Then you hope the tech knows what he is doing enough to verify the issue and call the right person.
It took about 2 months and 5 visits to get my outages fixed. I also had to get some of my neighbors to report the outages.
Hey thanks I didn't realize I could do that. Updated the article with the docsis log.
Bunch of
UCD invalid or channel unusable and SYNC Timing Synchronization failure - Failed to acquire QAM/QPSK symbol timing
[delayed]
What used to be very useful was to get the signal to noise ratio. When I had problems it was because they had installed amplifiers at various parts of the line and it eventually added up to a problem with amplifying too much noise.
> I imagine he was rolling his eyes while trying his utmost to care less.
Maybe they were doing this?
https://youtu.be/cyNmLzdshA8
[flagged]
> Xfinity is the only gigabit provider in this area. No competition. No alternatives. I can’t leave. So they don’t have to care.
many such cases...
"only gigabit provider". Like those grow on trees. Lots of people would love to have a fraction of that speed.
Its not like it is some monumental task. Fiber is cheaper than copper, and we managed to lay copper telephone lines and power lines to everybody. Where I live right now didn't even have DSL available at any point in time, the local telecomm didn't want to spend money on replacing some of the poorly functioning 60 year old copper lines despite everyone clamoring for any kind of wired connection. And yet a startup ISP managed to not only lay down gigabit direct to home fiber to the entire county in under 2 years, but they provide it for significantly cheaper than people's wireless/mobile internet. And they are still expanding across the entire state so are obviously earning money from it.
Existing telecomms have zero excuses after being given billions of dollars to do this after seeing startup fiber companies manage to do it profitably after the fact in even in some of the lowest density areas east of the Mississippi.
Shut up, 1gbps up/down in 2025 should be a basic human right.
I can't believe the things you learned to justify in US
everybody has a fraction of that speed
1. get a starlink.
2. else, use their modem. having your own modem excludes it from their service tracking infra and you dont show up when theres problems.
your modem also isnt optimized for their docsis configs and isnt what theyre targeting.
3. the reason for the problems is mainline signal noise causing the modem to drop. cable modem is a conductive signal shared across customers and requires constant maintenance. for example coax lines running to other customers will send noise back upstream, a bad splitter, an improperly terminated end, bent cable, or especially - damaged lines. often hidden in walls and crawlspace.
coax service issues require actual experts to diagnose and fix. all giant isps like xfinity are in the business of getting rid of expensive salaries and equipment. the techs they are sending cannot fix the issue, and if you reject their modem youre deprioritized.
nobody wants to work with cable because its all about signal levels and signal balancing. Fiber is what theyre focusing on as they get paid by the fed to do it.
the regulatory agencies are long past their political debut and are only there to give corpo friends public funds. choose a different service.