[Nextgrid]

> if you can get a message in that way, it's possible to circumvent the useless consumer-level support

Another option is to simply withhold payment for services non-rendered until the issue is fixed. This is totally fine as long as you've got documentation of the issue and a good-faith effort to resolve it with them beforehand.

What they want is to get paid; as long as they get paid they have no reason to bother actually even providing the service. Stopping payment turns it from it being your problem (you need to argue with them and convince them to spend extra money providing you with a service) to it being their problem (they now need to convince you to give them money).

Magically, they become much more cooperative all of a sudden, and if not, good riddance and you can sign up for something else (and avoid any kind of contract/commitment, since with consumer-grade telcos it's a matter of when you will need to do this again, not if).

[prirun]

Stopping payment sounds good, but may not work for a couple of reasons:

1) if you have payment auto deducted from a bank account, getting that stopped is not always straightforward. My bank told me they couldn't actually block ACH transactions, and to reverse one, I had to file a complaint with the company initiating the ACH, wait 30 days until the next bank statement to verify that the company didn't reverse the ACH, then ask the bank again to reverse the ACH.

2) in this case, the guy had other ISPs, but it looks like they were all satellite or DSL, which have really high latency. High latency and packet loss are way bigger issues than throughput, although with the severity of outage described in the article, high latency with no hard outage might be a better trade-off.

3) if you stop paying and get your service cut off, and it's critical for you (remote work, etc), now you have to scramble

[hamdingers]

This is a fantasy. They will disconnect your service and send your unpaid bills to collections. They hold all the cards.

[Nextgrid]

> They will disconnect your service and send your unpaid bills to collections

I've done it; both are true and yet not the end of the world:

Disconnect the service: this is obvious, but if you're doing this because the service is not usable and you are switching to another provider anyway, so good riddance? Best case scenario they magically fix the problem, worst-case no change.

Collections: yes, they called, I provided evidence of my communication with the provider trying to resolve it in good faith. Never heard back since and it's been 6 years.

Collections agencies have a business to run and focus on collecting valid debt. Invalid debt is a liability to them and they're not in the business of adjudicating disputes, so once provided with the evidence they drop the matter (of course the provider can still pursue you directly, which is why it's important to keep evidence of your good-faith efforts to resolve the matter).

[hamdingers]

So you're actually proposing that folks cancel their service and switch to an alternative, just with extra steps that risk harassment and credit impact. Cool.

Of course this only works if you have an alternative to switch to, which OP and most people in the US do not. I can't burn my relationship with my ISP because then I will not be able to do my job.