[jrockway]

This is probably not the norm. I have a friend that works in a call center, and they've been working remotely during the pandemic. Her company won't pay for anything; she uses her personal laptop, personal consumer-grade Internet connection, etc. The consumer ISP doesn't provide their stated upload and download ever, and the ISP charged her $100 to come out and investigate the issue without fixing it. (You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?) The company won't pay for the debugging. When the Internet dies, she's told "welp, you're done for today" and doesn't get paid. (She also works 4 days x 10 hours, so one bad day costs more than the average 5 x 8 employee.)

It is kind of a nightmare making every employee responsible for being the IT director for free. I imagine that most companies are not going to see good results here. (It's good when it's good, but what do you do when it gets bad? Nobody has a plan.)

All in all, consumer ISPs seem to be doing pretty good with the pandemic, but I worry that it's mostly a string of good luck rather than solid infrastructure investments.

[Spooky23]

> You run a speedtest to their speedtest node, and it doesn't live up to what is advertised. How can the ISP turn around and charge the customer for telling them that!?

Easy, the CPE equipment is garbage or placed in a shitty location. I'm a nerd, but my ancient wifi setup started to struggle with the entire family working and schooling all day. I upgraded to a Ubiquiti solution with multiple antennas and life is good.

[jrockway]

We are talking about wired performance here.

I worked on the CPE team for Google Fiber, and indeed, WiFi performance is something that we spent a lot of time on and never got perfect. The average ISP using off-the-shelf CPE doesn't stand a chance. I fear that the CPE is not the problem in my friend's case, and the ISP is just aggressively oversubscribing, and so nothing can be done. Switching to the business plan won't make a difference unless they drop all consumer traffic whenever the business subscriber needs to send and receive, and they are not charging enough money to lead me to believe they're doing that. I don't know anything about DOCSIS, though... I have worked at two ISPs and they both used GPON. The limitations of GPON, however, I understand well ;)

[Spooky23]

That's unfortunate.

With COVID wfh, I've definitely heard alot of horror stories about local ISPs, especially with time of day based issues. (10 & 2) seem to be high-disruption periods. Where our folks have gotten engaged, 30/35 times it's wireless issues.

One thing that I would offer is for your friend to try to get input from neighbors in a rough proximity. I did have an issue a few years ago with Time Warner Cable where a contractor screwed up and hung the wrong grade coax on a pole.

[jrockway]

I like the idea of surveying the neighbors. We will try that next :)

[heelix]

Commercial internet does not cost a lot of money. I do a cable modem and while my speeds are a bit slower than the residential option (for the same money) I don't have bandwidth caps or 'talk to the hand' when an issue happens. Night and day between the two experiences. Worth looking into.

[jrockway]

I agree. The problem is cost (higher, not being paid for by the company), and rewarding the ISP for their poor service by paying them more.

My philosophy is that you just have to accept that we messed up by letting one company monopolize the space, and pay them more for their better service... but not many people agree with me.