> ISPs hate it because it it makes their lives a lot harder - in cable networks, they now have to deal with a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium vs. a small set of standardized devices.
In other words, ISPs hate it because it forces them to actually do their jobs and be ISPs. The Internet itself is "a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium", and ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.
It's not the provision of Internet that's the problem, it's the customer service requests.
e.g., AT&T could provide perfect service to the home endpoint, but the customer bought some aftermarket router from their cousin, who had configured it for Verizon. Customer calls AT&T to holler. Tier 1 support doesn't know what that particular router config GUI even looks like, so it gets bumped to T2 or T3. Ultimately to find out that the customer's cousin had hardcoded DNS to some internal Verizon system that's not visible to AT&T.
Repeat x100K. ISPs job isn't just "provide the Internet," it's also "provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is"
> ISPs job isn't just "provide the Internet," it's also "provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is"
No ISP that I'm aware of will provide troubleshooting for devices they don't own. They just say "sorry, not our device, not our problem". When I installed my own cable modem and router, Comcast was quite clear about that. And I said "fine, no problem".
The ISP I work for does, and it's a very large one (not in the US). If a router is not ours, we check for sync or if PPPoE is up. We tell the customer what's the result of our tests and offer a technician if they are willing to pay in case it's not our fault.
Most people are unwilling to pay, and yell at customer service. Most of the times, specially when the router has sync it's customer fault.
The problem with this kind of procedure is that it's only a reasonable way to locate the problem when there are problems at that very moment. You're getting stonewalled when - during the day - you're reporting that it frequently loses sync during the night.
We can track sync changes, or really almost anything, crc errors, traffic, whatever we want really, although we only do it on demand.
You put a customer ID in the tracking system an it queries and stores results. It also performs analysis automatically, but most cases just puts the result in a frontend for analysis.
My ISP does, but they're the exception to the rule and cater to techies. Of course support questions for random devices need to be more specific than just "it doesn't work".
init7.net. They have a bunch of official guides, but also help with other devices and have debugged issues with new devices. Basically if your device is capable they want to make it work.
Init7 is great, I only had to tick a checkbox saying something like "I know what I am doing" and apart from providing the technical information they left me alone. Only had one problem with them that they resolved very quickly (the fiber cable got damaged somewhere in the basement).
+1 to init7. They've gone above and beyond when I needed them to change their routing policies to improve end to end latency to a specific destination. Good luck getting that from a major us carrier. And I wasn't even a customer.
> provide all the troubleshooting for every non-technical customer who just wants to watch Netflix but doesn't even know what a router is
People who don't even know what a router is don't buy their own equipment. Those who buy better routers don't require support for them, they call when there's a problem between the ISP and the router.
I disagree. If it is standard practice to BYOR, family or friends might give one to grandma, saying "use this, it will save you money".
I used to install satellite TV and saw this all the time. People would get old receivers from friends and family. Fortunately for me, the receivers were proprietary to that service (we don't use generic pay TV receivers in Canada) and the old ones were built like tanks. If people could have supplied any old cheap generic receiver, I probably would have had a bad time.
Problem is you'll eventually reach a point where the problem is deep and requires them to escalate, and if you aren't checking the box of tested customer cpe they'll stop. Example of this is when I found a Comcast backbone link with an incorrect/inconsistent MTU setting. Had to go back channel in the end to someone on the ibone team, but I had no chance in hell of getting that fixed promptly via regular support.
> you'll eventually reach a point where the problem is deep and requires them to escalate, and if you aren't checking the box of tested customer cpe they'll stop
I've been a Comcast customer for more than 20 years (in two different states) and have never encountered a problem like this, so I expect such problems are extremely rare. Every issue I've had has been of the kind where Comcast's support person can see right away that there's a problem on their end because they can't even see my cable modem's status even though I confirm to them that it's powered up and the cable is connected (and of course I have to go through the dance of rebooting it multiple times before they'll be satisfied). Most of the time they put me on hold for a while and then come back and the problem is fixed (I assume because some tech in the background rebooted or reset something that was borked). Once they had to send a tech to my house and it turned out there was a bad connection in the junction box they had installed outside.
I work at an ISP of sorts. It is a regional research and education network. We are owned by our members. Heterogeneity is definitely par for the course, but that does not stop us from trying to roll out some ubiquity where we can. Many of our CPE routers are the same make and model, and that makes maintenance and analysis much less error prone. I.e. better service for our member institutions.
If you want an ISP whose competitive advantage is dealing with whatever crazy shit the edge throws at it, then that is your prerogative. But having some ground rules and baseline behavior makes it so that the ISP can focus on more rewarding tasks, such as negotiating peerings, establishing direct tunnels, improving network observability, and predicting necessary backbone upgrades.
>The Internet itself is "a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium",
No, the shared medium in this case is referring the last part of the cable network where everyone in a neighborhood is transmitting effectively onto the same cable.
That is a really good point and one I hadn't considered.
Is it really that easy for a single device to take down a neighborhood? For example, could a bad actor trivially disrupt a node with a modified modem? I guess that would be difficult to defend against.
I don't know enough about docsis to say if it has any protections against out-of-spec devices.
I don't know why I'm surprised when things outside my area of expertise are fragile, considering things inside my area of expertise are fragile.
> Is it really that easy for a single device to take down a neighborhood? For example, could a bad actor trivially disrupt a node with a modified modem? I guess that would be difficult to defend against.
Yes, similarly to how you could jam a radio frequency. Fortunately, this is rare and only ever happens due to hardware failures in modems.
To bolster your point: Honestly they don't need to do much - the infrastructure is already there as a matter of being able to turn people's service up/down/on/off.
There is always a provider-managed CPE device that functions as the service demarcation point. This is the point where your contracted service speed is enforced (shape + egress queue and ingress policing).
You can have literally whatever router (dumb, smart, next-gen, whatever) spewing bits at X rate. The CPE will essentially normalize (police) that bit rate to your contracted speed (upstream scenario).
In other words, ISPs hate it because it forces them to actually do their jobs and be ISPs. The Internet itself is "a zoo of endpoints on a shared medium", and ISP stands for Internet Service Provider.