"Businesses will lie to customers and regulators as much as they're allowed to get away with because it's good for profits."
Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.
In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.
Yup - in NZ the infrastrucutre and the provider were separated as part of the nation-wide fibre-to-the-door rollout.
I switched provider the other week, after the old one discontinued a discount. All I had to do was sign up with the new provider and provide the connection number. They organised everything else and my old provider _refunded_ me for part of an unused pro-rata month.
And how much did the Liberals and Murdoch media hate that?
I got my FTTH connection a full ten years later than I would have if they hadn't fucked with the original plan. I can't forgive them for that. It's not even personal, it was holding back the progress of the entire country.
The behaviour of Optus and Telstra at the time dictated that the only way to do it properly was to have it done by the government. And they were right, because it was 'for Australia', not for private companies' shareholders.
100% agree. Abbott should be held to account for this forever. The plan wasn't perfect, but the way they messed it up for purely political point-scoring (and keeping Murdoch happy) was criminal.
What you get from competition is the incentive to lay down fiber optics, so that you attract customers with your higher speeds and can rent the infrastructure to your competition. Though there are other forces at work in urban areas, in my area I know a lot of people out in the 'burbs with fiber optics while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best. Not sure what's happening there, and I imagine is where municipal internet can help (with both the taxpayer dollars and bipartisan buy-in for it).
On the customer service front, the painpoint is usually related to mobile networks. It's very painful to switch from one carrier to another, with limited time offers to keep you or upselling when you've decided to join. It's when this spills over into their internet services that I want to get off the grid entirely.
From your post, it seems the European internet and mobile market is much more competitive than the US one. And yet much more regulated.
It seems that’s two markets where EU regulations have actually created both enough competition (still not a lot of providers, 3, 4 everywhere) and constraints on the licensees to give us cheap very high speed fiber and painless mobile switch (number portability).
Is your city dense? It’s so weird that the center would be left out of fiber when generally that’s where carriers prefer to lay it first.
Most people here would not. Comcast is a fun punching bag but for the most part it works fine for most people.
Later
Sorry, when I said "here", I meant (and you couldn't have known without reading my mind) "in my municipality", where I'm on the board that manages the ISP contracts and have some knowledge that normal people in fact actually like Comcast fine, are not especially interested in having a bunch of new choices. But we also have AT&T.
Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome. I used to be ok with comcast even with their incessant increasing of rates that i'd have to negotiate and the terrible service. Finally had enough, switched to AT&T fiber. omg. the difference is night and day. No more caps, no more random outages. Lower pings, half the price and no price increase so far. I don't know why anybody keeps it tbh
While I hate it, I agree with you. My in laws are my non-tech bellwether.
They use Comcast, and love it. It's zero maintenance, comes bundled with their cable, and provides in person customer support for almost any problem at all at no cost.
They're paying more than they should for slow speeds. But they don't care about that. They don't know technology, and their connection plays YouTube and Facebook.
Bingo. You really need to take HN thoughts (or really any nerd haven) with a grain of salt when it comes to _anything_ tech. Lots of strong (often informed) opinions that grounded in a reality that does not exist for most people.
There is competition in my area and it is way faster, and I did switch
But the competition isn't great either, so I get why people don't.
The modem/router the other company uses (can't use my own modem) is terrible and their support had no idea what I was talking about when I pointed to the DHCP table full of random shit that it wasn't freeing up, and logs full of DNS errors. And the wifi access points they provided were terrible too (free, but terrible). Eventually I worked around that by just adding my own router in the mix with a (internal 192.168) static IP, cut their DNS out of my router's list of DNS, and used my own wifi access points (which I had from Comcast days).
After my third support call I got a tech who provided instructions on putting their router/modem combo into bridge mode, but I'm hesitant to actually go through with that because I have no confidence their support can unwind me if anything goes wrong.
Like sibling points out, Comcast does offer faster download speed due to the competition. Still not as fast, but w/e.
It was interesting to see one of the commenters mention Fort Collins Connexion.
I've mentioned them a few times on HN with lots of other locals chiming in, but that service was incredible. I was very sad when I moved to an older apartment complex that refused to allow the buildup and had to go back to Comcast for a year before I moved away. Comcast offered 1.2Gb/s down, which was real, but the second anyone did a small upload, the entire network bogged down to actually unusable speeds (read: HN wouldn't load at all).
Cheaper and significantly better service from the municipal ISP than mega-corp.
That sounds like bufferbloat[1]. You can usually address that by using a router that supports active queue management, but it's a little esoteric. Newer versions of DOCSIS also specify support for simple active queue management on the modem, and I think this has become a little bit better in recent years. I used to have Comcast/Xfinity service and they didn't do terribly with regard to bufferbloat. They didn't do well, either, but it used to be much worse.
Some of the cable ISPs also have such asymmetric service that you can use most of the upload bandwidth just with ACKs while downloading. They often use ACK suppression to reduce the number ACKs and use the link more efficiently.
The best feature Comcast has added in recent years is the ability to request a $5 bill credit each time there's an outage. I use it more months than not. I suppose that's good customer service although it'd be better if it wasn't needed.
How recent is that? More than a decade ago, my friend related to me how his grandmother was subscribed to cable TV through comcast, but one channel wasn't working.
And every day, she'd call them to complain about the one channel that didn't work, and they'd apply a minor credit to her bill.
As far as I'm aware the "self-service" version of it on their website is in the past year. I think you're right that it's been possible over the phone for a long time though.
I don't switch my ISP because of their excellent customer service, instead I keep them because I have no idea how good their customer service is. When you need to know how good a company's customer service is that means the company has already failed at some level in the delivery.
There's more to running a good ISP than support. Good service is a bigger driver than customer service. And expectation management is a total lifecycle thing, if you let customers set their own expectations then the service is probably trash by default and your customer support staff will get the blame.
The solutions I see are 2 fold.
1. ISP gets completely involved in your home network, any kind of point of demarcation is completely scrapped in favour of optimising your home wifi.
2. ISP provides the best service they possibly can within reason, has good expectation management and is very firm with their demarc.
3. large scale provider with some kind of physical or regulated monopoly and the end users can smoke meat cigars.
1 has very diminishing returns. If you have 300 subscribers and only 5 of them are on dodgy links, you can get very involved with your customers network issues. But this doesnt scale, and when you try to scale you have left customers with all sorts of expectations. Its hard to package too, because theres a push to end call out fees. If you are rolling truck for "Why facebook slow" it can literally end your business.
Lots of ISPs (at least the Bell and Telus rebrands) are now doing remote-managed “home hubs” with integrated wifi that can be remote managed by the ISP. This solves the call-out problem and also fixes user expectations — and they’re leased not sold, so they can actually be good wifi devices.
I don’t personally use them, because “ISP managed wifi” sounds like a bad idea to me, but I can see the value to people who can’t distinguish the above two terms.
For me its really simple: an ISP is a utility. As long as the connection works I don't even think about it.
Why go through the hassle of changing it? Have to change modems and all that stuff. I've extended my contract for another 2 years because I have no complaints.
I recognize that the title is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but I'm one individual for which it's genuinely true. Sonic[0] has the best customer service of any company ever encountered, and it's not even close. The few times I've had to contact them for assistance, I've been very quickly connected with someone clearly _very_ technical who was able to grok my problem immediately and give clear, cogent, respectful debugging advice and perspective. I do not exaggerate when I say I would gladly pay double their current rate just for the peace of mind of knowing that I can depend on them if I ever need their support again. Not that I often do, because their baseline connectivity/speed is also great.
...yes, I know I look like a shill/bot. I don't care. They're genuinely just that good, and I will happily advocate for them until that ever changes.
I went to return an old modem to Spectrum in the Central Coast, CA a few weeks ago. I showed up to the store with it all packed up nice and ready to go. Employees there directed me to a tablet on a stand at the entrance and told me to enter my name into the waiting list. I told them I was just dropping off the box. Nope. gotta sign in.
Ok... one hour later they finally call me up (I have my infant baby in a stroller with me, luckily she didn't get fussy). Dude literally scanned the box with a barcode scanner, said thank you, and sent me on my way. Took less than 30 seconds. It was hard not to interpret this is an ISP power move. If I could go anywhere else I would.
When I turned in a modem and set-top box to Comcast, they just chucked it into a bin behind the desk and said that was it. No scanning or otherwise recording any of it. I demanded they fish it all back out so they could write me up a receipt, because I don't trust those bastards to claim I never returned that stuff.
To the workers credit, he did do that. Albeit with an incredible eyeroll.
I had this happen with Verizon, I insisted on a receipt, which they handwrote for me. Then they told me I never returned the device and charged me!
Couldn't get through to anyone, no replies. I refused to pay. They sent it to debt collection, no matter how many times I sent the picture of the receipt they refused to take it.
Took me 2 years to get it off my credit report, including sending multiple letters via certified mail. Caused my credit to go down by 100 until it finally disappeared and went back to normal.
You should see the mess we have in Australia. I think most people churn every 6 months as every ISP does the same stupid 30% off for first 6 months deal.
It's all the same national network so there's very little difference between ISPs.
Spectrum used to have a monopoly in my area, so I was stuck with their 15mbps speeds and constant outages. When Google Fiber became available here, I immediately subscribed to it (it was significantly cheaper for gigabit speeds).
As soon as the fiber was set up, I called Spectrum to cancel my account, and after being bounced around between a couple support people, I was finally transferred to retention where I could have my account properly closed. Except instead of a person, I got a machine telling me that the department was closed for the day, and I should call back Monday (this wasn't even late on a weekend, it was midday Friday).
I called back to ask what was wrong and why I was transferred to an empty department, and the support rep told me the last rep should have known and shouldn't have transferred me there, but I would indeed need to wait until Monday. Fine.
Monday I call back, get through the layers of reps, and am finally told that they're having an internal outage and won't be able to cancel my account, but they assured me that if I incur any additional charges on my bill because of the delay, they'll be happy to remove them.
I don't know how long this "outage" is going to last, so I wait a couple days and call back again, very quickly get transferred to where I need to be, and with no pushback or excuses whatsoever get told my account is now cancelled and my bill is all settled up, and to have a good day. Great. I cancel the virtual credit card I used to pay them, since I no longer need it.
A month later I get a text from Spectrum telling me they aren't able to bill me, and my service will be interrupted if I don't pay this new bill. I call and support tells me that my account is cancelled, I owe nothing, and to ignore the text. I do make some efforts to verify that the text is actually from Spectrum, and it does seem to be. No indications of a spammer impersonating Spectrum.
The next month it happens again, and this time when I call I'm told my account is not cancelled and my service has been suspended because I now owe a couple months of payment plus late fees, and they won't be able to cancel my account until I pay those. They have no record of me cancelling my account, and unfortunately the manager who has the authority to waive the late fees is out today. I'm offered the opportunity to pay the full amount of bogus charges, and wished a good day when I decline.
Every month since then they've texted me to let me know that another payment for the month hasn't gone through. Lately the texts have started saying that they will be sent to collections. Part of me hopes they take me to court over it.
I think if you asked Spectrum, they would tell you that I'm still a customer of theirs, and that I'm sticking with them because of their excellent customer service.
No, it is because there is literally nothing to switch to. The costs of infrastructure are too great to have real competition. And on top of that they also sue anyone who tries.
They are parasites. Other countries have fast internet at reasonable prices without weird data caps.
I hope they get regulated and forced to lease out the "last mile" at cost. I'd like them to get eminent domained for stealing taxpayer money on lies that they would build infrastructure. Unfortunately we are instead looking at four years of deregulation. A huge gift to these massive assholes.
That’s not the question, though - it’s would they switch. Switching has significant friction, at least in people’s minds. You probably wouldn’t switch from ISP1 at $30/mo to ISP2 at $29.95/mo (with the same service) unless you’re irritated with ISP1 for other reasons. You might have chosen ISP2 if you were starting from scratch, though.
Excellent customer service for an ISP is no service. Your internet speeds don’t deviate I don’t call you. Otherwise I go for the lowest price and if your agree to a low price, your customer service is good.
Comcast has to be supplying their people with bulk lots of experimental aerospace-grade ganga if they can say this without immediately bursting into laughter.
I assume they just hire sociopaths for this sort of PR role. That way the employees will have no issues with lying through their teeth, and the company doesn't need to spend money on weed.
Starlink is 2x per month as my ATT fiber account. Can't compare speeds since Starlink's website doesn't show speeds with monthly pricing. I doubt it's 2x the speed
I just speed tested my Starlink connection at 93 Mpbs down, 9.3 Mpbs up. That's slower than usual but better than 10x the speed I was getting from a rural telco, and it has been more reliable too, for about the same price.
What am I missing out on from a faster connection?
I get 1gbps up/down for ~$74/month. So Starlink is 1.7x for much less speed.
The only way Starlink looks attractive to me is if living off the grid and its the only option. By the time I'm no longer paying for utilities, the increased for less performance will not be as expensive. That's not happening any time soon
I looked at the Starlink website and it looks like residential service is $120/mo. I pay less than that ($110/mo) for 1 Gbps down and 40 Mbps up from Comcast. They also give me a public v4 IP, not CGNAT like Starlink. My service is quite reliable (I would say I have a few hours' downtime once every year or two), so that part is a wash. The one advantage Starlink has is they offer a /56 to IPv6 customers, not just a /60 that Comcast does.
Obviously it varies significantly based on where you are. Different ISPs are different, and even the same provider might be good in one region and bad in another. But for me at least, Starlink would be a terrible choice. They are worse in most every way (sometimes significantly so), and only better in one way.
My ISP (Spectrum business, not even the consumer end) can't even get me logged in to my account so I can manage my service. Multiple calls, same results.
And they keep jacking up the price too. Astound, here I come!
Astound has worked really hard to lose my business, I moved to Comcast not too long ago. Astound also now stiffs you for the full billing month when you cancel, FYI, so if you make the mistake of switching away from Astound two days into your billing cycle, they'll try to collect the other 28 days as pure profit.
Either the customer or regulator needs to hold companies to account. In an industry that is a natural monopoly like last-mile internet delivery, then regulators need to step in and work hard to structure the market such that it actually functions properly, with as much competition as possible.
In Australia this had the government own the wires, which rented the capacity to companies, that sold internet service to consumers. An actual functioning market with competition, instead of one company owning all the wires for a town/city/state, refusing to rent them to anyone else, and charging sky high rates.
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