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urlocaldesi t1_j1xin5c wrote

Reply to comment by Derstilweedndat in Spectrum has its head so far up it’s ass that they think I don’t have service. I didn’t lose service at all during the storm and it’s working just fine now. by Guygan

Spectrum is one of the worst ISP’s available, but for many is the only option. Their crappy customer service (during regular service, not weather-induced complaints) and their hidden fees tick a lot of people off. The fact that they don’t seem to have clear communication with the folks who actually need to know when their internet service will be restored, outside of corporate boilerplate language, is a very heavy straw on the camel’s back for a lot of us stuck with Spectrum until better options are more widespread/affordable.

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sixfootskunkplant t1_j1xl8o8 wrote

Not defending Spectrum, per se, but I work in networking. When there's an outage in a general area we notify everyone in that area. You may have service, and your neighbors don't.

They're not actually looking at individual houses to see who does and does not have an outage. It's based off of people calling them to report outages. Maybe the guy down the street called, who knows.

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BigFatBlindPanda t1_j1xpc4c wrote

Used to work a NOCC and yeah, lights go flashy flashy until the buttons make them stop.

Definitely not investing into precision push notification services.

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Comprehensive-Act-74 t1_j1zn0k0 wrote

Not saying that Spectrum is looking customer by customer, but they definitely have that ability. Every device on a cable companies network is registered and managed by them whether they own it or you own it. They have the ability to get signal levels from individual modems and STBs, and track how many devices are up/down. There are always going to be devices on/off, but if you have a segment that has ~90% of the registered devices normally online, and then it plummets to near zero, they know about that outage about as quickly as you do to be able to tell the techs.

I worked for a small cable company on the backbone side, but in a small outage, like one tree on the wires or car into the pole, the NOC could look at the devices offline and account addresses and tell the techs the break was mostly like between house 10 and 12 if they were both subscribers. Bigger events we would lose backhaul fiber, so lots of nodes would be down, and you would troubleshoot that node by node at first before moving down to street by street mop up.

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sixfootskunkplant t1_j20mzcw wrote

Of course they have the ability, but there’s no way in hell they’re paying for the monitoring tools, or taking the time during a big outage to reach down with that granularity. No chance at all.

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Guygan OP t1_j1z7sz8 wrote

> They're not actually looking at individual houses to see who does and does not have an outage.

Then the message should say "To our customers who have an outage: We are working hard to restore service in your area."

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gamertag0311 t1_j1yvxx2 wrote

I have Spectrum where I live (Washington County) and they seem to be reliable for me. Maybe the people hating on Spectrum don't understand weather

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