Comcast's Xfinity Mobile Is Now Throttling Resolution, And Speed. Even Unlimited Users.

[mynameisjuan]

6 minutes ago, MyInnerFred said:

A company hires appropriate people to handle decision making and task handling to get things done. 

 

A lot of fiber in major cities that have stagnating internet improvements already have pre-laid fiber, you can name a hundred different tasks that ISP companies have to deal with in order to provide better or even stable quality of service to the consumer but the fact of the matter is large ISP companies neglect to fix QoS issues because they can afford to do so and it draws more revenue overall at the moment. 

 

US ISP companies are falling behind other countries more and more every passing year.

 

I've talked to a gentlemen I know on discord who works as a Comcast onsite contractor and he's hinted at negligence from Comcast to maintain stable service or improving service in general due to corporate funds being *redirected elsewhere*.

Yeah I still dont believe this "gentleman who works for comcast"

 

Yeah cities have prelaid fiber but you do realize that it only supports so many connections? How about they had a grant or only enough room in the conduit for 24 count fiber and now all strands are in use making it harder to expand? Did you take that into account? No. 

 

And please explain in detail what these QoS issues are and how they can be resolved with money? I mean you seem like you know the networking side and how money fixes everything. 

 

Is there corruption in ISPs, no shit, same with many other businesses. But blaming every fucking issue on being greedy is just ignorance. There is a lot of work and design that goes into upgrading or designing a network. No matter how much money you put into it it takes time. 

 

And back to the hiring enough men, again, good outside plant techs are in very short supply. In this area the 3 major ISPs are hiring each others outside plant on a pay per job to assist with they back log of installs or fiber deploy. As most these people are busy "fixing" the bitching customer that refused to assist rebooting their own router. 

 

Again money doesnt magically fix everything. 

[TheKDub]

Such honesty... (See spoiler)

Spoiler

 

 

[79wjd]

1 minute ago, TheKDub said:

Such honesty... (See spoiler)

  Hide contents

 

 

NN was never intended to stop these sorts of actions and QoS always was and always will be common on networks.

[AngryBeaver]

13 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

What is the total traffic that they say and the total traffic that your router reports? 

Last month for example I think I used right at 900gb according to comcast, but 720gb ish according to my router.

[TheKDub]

7 minutes ago, djdwosk97 said:

NN was never intended to stop these sorts of actions and QoS always was and always will be common on networks.

My main focus was on the fact that they clearly stated "We won’t block, slow or throttle your data", but are clearly doing just that.

 

We've already had a few issues with them throttling our home internet connection as well.

[Fred Castellum]

24 minutes ago, mynameisjuan said:

Yeah I still dont believe this "gentleman who works for comcast"

 

Yeah cities have prelaid fiber but you do realize that it only supports so many connections? How about they had a grant or only enough room in the conduit for 24 count fiber and now all strands are in use making it harder to expand? Did you take that into account? No. 

 

And please explain in detail what these QoS issues are and how they can be resolved with money? I mean you seem like you know the networking side and how money fixes everything. 

 

Is there corruption in ISPs, no shit, same with many other businesses. But blaming every fucking issue on being greedy is just ignorance. There is a lot of work and design that goes into upgrading or designing a network. No matter how much money you put into it it takes time. 

 

And back to the hiring enough men, again, good outside plant techs are in very short supply. In this area the 3 major ISPs are hiring each others outside plant on a pay per job to assist with they back log of installs or fiber deploy. As most these people are busy "fixing" the bitching customer that refused to assist rebooting their own router. 

 

Again money doesnt magically fix everything. 

Fair enough on that one.

 

While I did state they have the revenue available to remedy the QoS issues such as network over utilization, I've never made the statement money fixes all so don't lump me into the group of people you have under that category. For starters they could construct more nodes in areas where they "Know" they have high bandwidth access around the clock, there are lots of areas that only have two or three options for ISP services that the consumer can choose from and the ones with the strongest advertising campaign tend to have the highest amount of network utilization causing poor QoS and packet loss on a daily basis. 

 

I use to live in Sugar Land(suburbs look Houston area) which is a pretty well off area with very strong job growth, standard of living is higher than most of Houston and has been for decades now, the ISP quality of service has stagnated for decades there as well. Common areas with severe network over utilization have never been address by providers lke Comcast but they'll happily expand user base of their services in the same area. The only time when any residents in the area will see Comcast come out with their trucks is when there is a outage and even then it typically takes from 24 hours to 72 hours for service to fully come back. Very nice influx of new ISP subscribers for larger ISP companies whilst smaller ISP companies like Windstream that were in the area for years are losing subscriber counts. Larger ISP providers such as Comcast still have the same over network utilization issues despite higher higher revenue from said area over all these years. 

 

Yeah I've heard enough stories to believe that most contractors are busy fixing router issues for clueless customer that don't know how to reset their device.

 

Indeed money doesn't magically fix everything(I'm quite aware of the difficulties companies may come across as they operate to expand), what I'm getting at is that ISP companies like Comcast are more than happy to neglect areas that don't have stable services whilst happily adding more subscriber bandwidth load to the same area. There is a reason why US ISP improvement is stagnating when compared to other countries. 

 

I can happily agree to disagree with you if you want to go further on this particular topic. I don't want to spend my half day off digging up information I spend a normal work day looking for just for this. 

[Lurick]

1 hour ago, Ithanul said:

No doubt.  Probably biggest issue is the full configuration and roll out.  I talked to a chap during my AT that is a senior net admin, and he just does big hospital network roll outs.  The bigger the network, the longer it takes.  He said it takes like a year or longer to just to do a roll out for a network handling just 30,000+ devices.  Along with making sure the different routers and switches talk to each other.  After him explaining a Juniper router to me....yeah, Cisco sounds a lot easier to deal with in certain regards (though, Junipers are neat in the regards you can get them to roll out update configs without being there).

Not sure what was talked about or in what regards but Cisco definitely has a slew of network management tools to push configs (among other things) remotely very easily. All major network companies have orchestration tools for that, they would die without it.

 

 

1 hour ago, Ithanul said:

Yeah, there usually not just one type of router and switch involved (not counting firewalls, proxies, DHCP servers, DNS servers, etc.) .  O and pair with the fact routers and switches can be on different iOSes.  If one ever messed with some Cisco hardware, they know what I am getting at, especially if they touched any of the DTECH models.

Dtech models? You sure you're not confusing Cisco gear with something else?

[mynameisjuan]

1 hour ago, MyInnerFred said:

Comcast are more than happy to neglect areas that don't have stable services whilst happily adding more subscriber bandwidth load to the same area.

The reason being is easy of setup. If you can get a customer setup in an hour or two vs time and resources to install, run fiber or cable, install the new blade, down time for maintenance windows, etc...you will focus on the quick and easy.

 

As a business standpoint it makes sense too. A business is still about making money. 

 

1 hour ago, MyInnerFred said:

I can happily agree to disagree with you if you want to go further on this particular topic.

Thats perfectly fine. It wasnt mean to be an argument, just being in the business for so long I know what goes behind upgrading. Even we are upgrading as fast as we can on some platforms and its taking a long time. 

 

Ive been in public and had people approach me  about stealing their money and take it out on me. I guess I just have a trigger.

[Tellos]

@mynameisjuan workign for this company I dont agree with the moves form obile but I am not in that department, far as upgrades they are expensive I am hopeful fiber deep will help us get further along but I am not yet privy to it's day to day status.

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Ok but how about trying to work at an ISP and ordering all the correct equipment, laying new fiber, getting grants, digging permit, new ONTs, SFPs, scheduling down time with business customers, scaling up equipment, correctly configuring the switches...on and on and on. Not including tech able to properly do it which is in a huge shortage in a lot of areas.

 

People think you can just throw fucking money at it and BOOM, better internet. Its not that fucking easy and sometimes not cost effective. 

Like 30 other countries figured out to do it better than we have so it really shouldn't be that hard. I mean if power companies said they can't increase the power grid infrastructure to supply the power people need then it would be an issue but if it's internet it seems people don't care as much. They need to invest in better infrastructure and stop saying it's too hard. They have enough money to lobby for the repeal of net neutrality but they can't upgrade their infrastructure? I call b.s. on that. 

[79wjd]

5 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Like 30 other countries figured out to do it better than we have so it really shouldn't be that hard. I mean if power companies said they can't increase the power grid infrastructure to supply the power people need then it would be an issue but if it's internet it seems people don't care as much. They need to invest in better infrastructure and stop saying it's too hard. They have enough money to lobby for the repeal of net neutrality but they can't upgrade their infrastructure? I call b.s. on that. 

Power companies limit power use too. Literally yesterday my office had to shut off all lights that weren't absolutely necessary and any AC they could to use less power.

[Brooksie359]

1 minute ago, djdwosk97 said:

Power companies limit power use too. Literally yesterday the office had to shut off all lights and any AC they could to use less power.

Not at an equivalent level as isps do for internet. We are way behind the majority of developed countries when it comes to internet. If other countries figured it out then it should be easy to do the same. 

[Misanthrope]

On 7/2/2018 at 2:28 AM, Sierra Fox said:

it's a straight up money grab. it's despicable, but technically not illegal, so i doubt there will be any ramifications for them doing it. It's not like they have a good reputation to uphold.

Actually I submit that this should be and perhaps even is already, illegal: Mobile phone signal is unique and different from other forms of service for internet by virtue of being transmitted as radio signal.

 

You see, civilians and even regular private enterprises and competitors can't just go "I am going to do my radio transmitting on this specific frequency!" Because radio signal on the same frequency conflict with one another, these are heavily regulated and the government pretty much decides to assign certain frequencies or frequency ranges to certain uses. Running a pirate radio station for example is a pretty serious crime.

 

When you get assigned a frequency to run your mobile data you're getting strict enforcement from the government saying that you and only you are entitled to use the frequency because otherwise nobody could do business. You are assigned a concession, exclusive rights to that frequency. Just like over-the-air TV.

 

While there's some leeway in what you're allowed to use it for it has traditionally been very heavily regulated by the FCC that regulates not only technical but other concerns.

 

By establishing that Verizon (or in this case Comcast though they basically represent Verizon because they are subletting the frequency but are still ultimately responsible) can impose restrictions of quality of service without addressing bandwidth concerns through regular means (i.e. Pricing packages) you're to me misusing a public resource that's represented on that frequency that you have been assigned to use.

 

So Verizon-Comcast can't come and impose the same kind of ridiculous measures they impose on their cable business, even though that cable business was (wrongly) partially public funded as well (See telecom act of 1996) it was still largely their infrastructure investment that the general public has no stake in as it's just their private property (But sometimes partially build using public resources like poles and tunnels, it's complicated) Or at least it can be argued that way.

 

However the frequency is basically public domain that gets assigned to a service provider as a concession but ultimately belongs to the public and henceforth, the people.

[Donut417]

On 7/2/2018 at 3:58 AM, FlpDaMattress said:

Welcome to a world without Net Neutrality... 600kbp/s is borderline unusable.

It has nothing to do with that. Comcast does NOT have a cellular network, they use Verizon's, who may be leaning on them. Comcast also uses its own hotspots to fill in the gaps. But generally those hotspots are broadcasted from their cable customers Wireless Gateways. Which is one reason why I dont use Comcast equipment., as Im not going to extend the hotspot network for a company who bends its customers over and ..... well you get the picture. 

On 7/2/2018 at 4:06 AM, Christophe Corazza said:

Why throttle some people for free, when you can force them to pay more or have no internet?

Backlash most likely. Comcast doesnt have the wireless network and they dont want to piss off their customers. I mean we have 3 major carriers and T Mobile has been forcing changes in the industry. Comcast is tied to Verizon for cellular and they supplement use with their hotspots if you can find one. Personally I think it was a dumb business decision to offer wireless service with out a wireless network. At least for some one the size of Comcast. Im kind of surprised they didnt try to buy a wireless carrier to make this happen. 

[Ithanul]

3 hours ago, Lurick said:

Not sure what was talked about or in what regards but Cisco definitely has a slew of network management tools to push configs (among other things) remotely very easily. All major network companies have orchestration tools for that, they would die without it.

 

 

Dtech models? You sure you're not confusing Cisco gear with something else?

I am aware of that.  I just find it neat that such can be done within Juniper devices.  Same can be done with Cisco if one drops into the script terminal as well (something I was unaware and me and the chap chat up some about that as well).  My experience with network devices is still newbish level, and so I love it when I can chat to actual net admins in our unit and other units (get lucky usually and learn some tricks from them that I can use downrange).

 

DTECH has Cisco gear specifically for military usage.  It can be a royal pain in the rear depending on the iOS on the gear.  This one of DTECHs I get to touch on occasions when I am on orders along with some of the router models.

Spoiler

 

[mynameisjuan]

3 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Like 30 other countries figured out to do it better than we have so it really shouldn't be that hard. I mean if power companies said they can't increase the power grid infrastructure to supply the power people need then it would be an issue but if it's internet it seems people don't care as much. They need to invest in better infrastructure and stop saying it's too hard. They have enough money to lobby for the repeal of net neutrality but they can't upgrade their infrastructure? I call b.s. on that. 

What people are missing is we are talking UPGRADES. Other countries deployed fiber before the US as phone lines were still highly used. Same with AU. 

 

Also the US has a HUGE fucking area to cover vs other countries meaning its harder to run more and more lines mostly due to staff. Also its still not a smart business move to upgrade for lower density locations. Like the 25 million grant we are working on to upgrade a location of 25 mile radius. This is for around maybe 2500 customers. At $60/month thats 12 years to cover the cost. That cost is just a small part of the problem. 

 

Again, this not about how much money they have to throw at the problem, there are a shit ton more of problems (mainly staff) that are why upgrading is a problem. 

 

People honestly need to run fiber or provision a single PON to see why this upgrade is not a simple "just fix it". Want something to blame, how about blame Cisco and their monopoly cost and the lack of skilled outside plant workers. 

[MoonSpot]

Welcome to the Canadian telco/isp business environment citizens of the United States; and just think, you're only ankle deep.  Wait till the show really gets started.

 

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

What people are missing is we are talking UPGRADES. Other countries deployed fiber before the US as phone lines were still highly used. Same with AU. 

 

Also the US has a HUGE fucking area to cover vs other countries meaning its harder to run more and more lines mostly due to staff. Also its still not a smart business move to upgrade for lower density locations. Like the 25 million grant we are working on to upgrade a location of 25 mile radius. This is for around maybe 2500 customers. At $60/month thats 12 years to cover the cost. That cost is just a small part of the problem. 

 

Again, this not about how much money they have to throw at the problem, there are a shit ton more of problems (mainly staff) that are why upgrading is a problem. 

 

People honestly need to run fiber or provision a single PON to see why this upgrade is not a simple "just fix it". Want something to blame, how about blame Cisco and their monopoly cost and the lack of skilled outside plant workers. 

Their entire business is based off this infrastructure and they have been at it a long time so they should have been able to figure out how to get it done by now. 

[Lurick]

9 hours ago, Ithanul said:

I am aware of that.  I just find it neat that such can be done within Juniper devices.  Same can be done with Cisco if one drops into the script terminal as well (something I was unaware and me and the chap chat up some about that as well).  My experience with network devices is still newbish level, and so I love it when I can chat to actual net admins in our unit and other units (get lucky usually and learn some tricks from them that I can use downrange).

 

DTECH has Cisco gear specifically for military usage.  It can be a royal pain in the rear depending on the iOS on the gear.  This one of DTECHs I get to touch on occasions when I am on orders along with some of the router models.

Oh, you're referring to the python shell inside the boxes, that makes more sense. Standard IOS (which is slowly moving away) doesn't really have a very robust scripting capability but the IOS-XE, NX-OS, XR, and a few other platforms have full python shells and much more robust capabilities.

[Tellos]

@Brooksie359 infastructure costs ALOT of moeny and does not get a ROI until 5 to 10 years. Not something most investors are willing to do on a whim. Fiber is even harder on companies. Atop of this regulatiosn paperwork etc mean more cost and time to lay lines and new things.

[leadeater]

11 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

People honestly need to run fiber or provision a single PON to see why this upgrade is not a simple "just fix it". Want something to blame, how about blame Cisco and their monopoly cost and the lack of skilled outside plant worker

Just don't use Cisco  Oh wait US banned all the cheaper equipment providers. In a way the high cost is a bit self inflected and I get there might be security concerns but damn, I'm sure there is a solution to that. All the Huawei stuff here has to go through an extremely long "5 eyes" certification process for each and every model to be allowed to be used and there are specific models for our countries so it's not impossible.

 

Saying that though I'm pretty sure our GPON network is mostly, if not all, Alcatel-Lucent/Nokia.

 

11 hours ago, mynameisjuan said:

Also the US has a HUGE fucking area to cover vs other countries meaning its harder to run more and more lines mostly due to staff.

US does have a lot more people than a lot of the other countries too though, and more money. With enough prioritization the roll out could be sped up a lot but I don't see that happening.

 

Here in NZ we may be small so could be said is a simpler deployment but we are almost exclusively low density population centers spread far apart with mountains, rivers, nature reserves literally everywhere. If we went with the US mindset only 3 cities in all of NZ would have fibre at all, maybe even only 2.

[Ithanul]

4 hours ago, Lurick said:

Oh, you're referring to the python shell inside the boxes, that makes more sense. Standard IOS (which is slowly moving away) doesn't really have a very robust scripting capability but the IOS-XE, NX-OS, XR, and a few other platforms have full python shells and much more robust capabilities.

Interesting, maybe down the road the military ones will leverage it.  Then again maybe not.  The paranoid level of having access to change configs or even make accounts at times is at insane levels in certain areas (heck, I was down range and one stack I was not even allowed login rights to manage it.  Had to call chaps in a different country and time zone to do that). 

[Brooksie359]

3 hours ago, Tellos said:

@Brooksie359 infastructure costs ALOT of moeny and does not get a ROI until 5 to 10 years. Not something most investors are willing to do on a whim. Fiber is even harder on companies. Atop of this regulatiosn paperwork etc mean more cost and time to lay lines and new things.

People keep on saying that like these companies don't make massive amounts of money. They had signed a deal to get this done a long time ago and still haven't delivered. Again most other countries have figured out how to do it shouldn't be so difficult. Why make excuses when you can make solutions? 

[Voids]

On 7/3/2018 at 8:01 PM, Ithanul said:

I think some missing the fact that: Comcast Mobile is basically Verizon mobile with Comcast brand smacked on it.

Comcast is in a sense acting as a reseller of Verizon.  Saw the limits on the unlimited and went, well that looks familiar.  Found out, its Verizion, no wonder why it looked familiar:

 

I know that pain.  Was down range, had to warn folks to back off on the streaming; otherwise, say bye, bye to streaming.  Considering the chaps that are the end point on the sat dish kept calling warning us if the bandwidth usage did not go down, the whole node would be unhooked.

Lol DVD quality. America truly is the one of the worst examples capitalism. I'm sorry for all the users on this who live there and deal with getting shafted in the ass while saying "we just have to take it" in northern Ireland we have more ISPs than America.

[Donut417]

On 7/4/2018 at 11:35 AM, Brooksie359 said:

People keep on saying that like these companies don't make massive amounts of money. They had signed a deal to get this done a long time ago and still haven't delivered. Again most other countries have figured out how to do it shouldn't be so difficult. Why make excuses when you can make solutions? 

These companies are owned by investors aka Shareholders. Share holders dont want to spend millions on fiber upgrades when they can milk what they have now. Its just how it is in the US. Most shareholders are short term, meaning what matters is a quarter or a year. The fact is many saw what happened when Verizon started deploying Fiber 10 years ago. The profit was not there. Yeah they made money, but they didn't make enough to make shareholders happy. 

 

So really the only solution is for the tax payers to deploy a fiber network. The issue here? Well how the hell are we going to come up with money to deploy fiber, when we dont have money for our schools, roads, electrical infrastructure, dams, levies, bridges, and healthcare?