<story><title>AT&amp;T Fiber in the SF Bay Area is flipping bits</title><url>https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1335373029245775872</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AaronFriel</author><text>Trying to explain this issue to AT&amp;amp;T support is like trying to convince a doctor you&amp;#x27;re the only person on earth with a particular disease.&lt;p&gt;Even explaining the issue is hard. It&amp;#x27;s not an outage, my internet isn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;out&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s intermittently &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt;. The phone support agents aren&amp;#x27;t prepared for this, and I can&amp;#x27;t find any way to escalate or speak to a network engineer.&lt;p&gt;I feel like if I spoke to the right engineer, there&amp;#x27;d be a ticket on this and they&amp;#x27;d roll at truck to their facilities or the IPX within an hour. It&amp;#x27;s a major network issue to flip bits, it&amp;#x27;s costing them bandwidth with retransmits and could be breaking SLAs with their business customers.&lt;p&gt;On the phone the most they could do was roll a truck to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gamegoblin</author><text>When I first moved to Seattle there was a great local ISP called CondoInternet that mainly specialized in high-density downtown buildings.&lt;p&gt;I was once having some packet loss issues and called their support line. I assume the company was really small at the time, because the guy who answered the phone was clearly a network engineer who knew the system inside and out. I read him a couple of traceroutes over the phone and we resolved the issue within minutes.&lt;p&gt;I have never experienced such perfect tech support before or after that with any other ISP.</text></comment>
<story><title>AT&amp;T Fiber in the SF Bay Area is flipping bits</title><url>https://twitter.com/catfish_man/status/1335373029245775872</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AaronFriel</author><text>Trying to explain this issue to AT&amp;amp;T support is like trying to convince a doctor you&amp;#x27;re the only person on earth with a particular disease.&lt;p&gt;Even explaining the issue is hard. It&amp;#x27;s not an outage, my internet isn&amp;#x27;t &lt;i&gt;out&lt;/i&gt;, it&amp;#x27;s intermittently &lt;i&gt;wrong&lt;/i&gt;. The phone support agents aren&amp;#x27;t prepared for this, and I can&amp;#x27;t find any way to escalate or speak to a network engineer.&lt;p&gt;I feel like if I spoke to the right engineer, there&amp;#x27;d be a ticket on this and they&amp;#x27;d roll at truck to their facilities or the IPX within an hour. It&amp;#x27;s a major network issue to flip bits, it&amp;#x27;s costing them bandwidth with retransmits and could be breaking SLAs with their business customers.&lt;p&gt;On the phone the most they could do was roll a truck to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>warent</author><text>The obnoxious thing to me is the hubris that must be behind this. Either they considered it and decided they would never encounter a system error like this and refused to implement an escalation route, or they never even considered it.&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps even worse than that, maybe they considered it, decided it was possible, but just don&amp;#x27;t care because of their insane borderline monopoly.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t understand how internet companies provide such consistently awful service.&lt;p&gt;Slightly off topic story, I&amp;#x27;ve recently changed to another provider called Starry, and they force you to have a second router in front of your own router which they claim &amp;quot;decodes&amp;quot; their stream between the modem. I don&amp;#x27;t know the real reason but I&amp;#x27;m pretty sure that&amp;#x27;s not it. If you plug their modem directly into a non-Starry router, the router just doesn&amp;#x27;t detect a connection.&lt;p&gt;One day, I tried to torrent something, and my internet would immediately get throttled to 0mbps. After investigating I found out that their router had a custom OS which hid a firewall and various security settings. Amusingly you could still access those settings if you just manually entered the page names into the address bar. Now all their stupid settings are disabled and I just feel badly for all the folks who use their service and don&amp;#x27;t have the savvy I do to actually get what they&amp;#x27;re paying for.</text></comment>