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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • No shit, it’s the monopoly game all over again. I worked for a local provider for 4 years in engineering. I would personally like to see greater restrictions on ISP M&As, investor ownership of communication providers, and media company owners of communication providers.

    At my company, we were purchased by another provider that had mismanaged themselves to the brink of bankruptcy only to be saved by some investors at the last second. Our staff was cut by about half. A year or so after that we were bought by the biggest bunch of soulless monsters I’ve ever worked with. From there the company went growth-by-acquisition crazy, purchasing every Mom and Pop provider they could get their hands on.

    Years later I was working an IP address consolidation project when I came across an FCC filing from the late 90s written by former management at my original company asking the FCC to reject the GTE purchases that resulted in Verizon as we know it today. I was amazed, and also saddened. It was all coming true.




  • Last I knew Google Fiber used PON. With PON a provider would not allow a subscriber to use their own equipment.

    The above is important because PON is essentialy one bidirectional fiber from a central office serving dozens of customers in the field. If you plug in with something on the same wavelength you could interrupt all the other customers on your PON. In PON since your fiber is not dedicated all the way back to the CO, they would have no way to know what device was trying to connect to their access node. They would need to configure your devices Mac address similar to how DOCSIS cable internet works.

    If they ARE using dedicated fibers back to the CO then that would more likely be Active Ethernet, a slightly different technology. They would probably still tell you no because of how the CPE (the box at your house) needs to be remotely configured by the access node for shapers etc.

    Is it possible that you have a power issue at your house that is causing the failures?



  • A few years back I worked for a regional Internet service provider in the northeast US. One day a guy who did finance and regulatory work for us asked me how many of our customer point to point links with A and Z locations in different states were either dedicated to voice traffic or carried more than x percent voice traffic.

    After asking a few thought provoking questions like if the percentage was based on traffic measurements or link capacity and how we would make that calculation on a circuit with asymmetrical speeds, I explained that it would be nearly impossible for us to tell unless the customer declared it to us.

    He then told me that there was some new federal tax on interstate circuits carrying voice traffic and that if we couldn’t tell if a customer circuit was carrying voice traffic or not, that we would just need to start charging them all the tax no matter what. It might even apply to regular Internet services where the edge router and customer site were in different states.

    And that is the story of how the ISP that I worked for added yet another fee to all of its customers.