As a customer, I like it.

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.

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"

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".

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.

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.

Out of curiosity, which ISP do you have?

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 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.

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.

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.

Doesn't "if you choose to use your own cable modem/router, it must meet the DOCSIS 3 specification" do this? That's the rule Comcast made me follow.

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.

All it takes is a single device with a broken configuration to spew crap onto the wrong channels, taking down the whole neighborhood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Physical_layer

On the Internet it stops being a shared medium the minute it gets out of the cable network into fiber/ethernet switched+routed interconnections.

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.

Yes, similarly to how you could jam a radio frequency. Fortunately, this is rare and only ever happens due to hardware failures in modems.

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).

Which works out great for me. I can use OpenWRT with no hassle.

More to the point, I see the cable stuff as "ISP land" in that it's directly interfacing with their internal hardware, and so has to dance to their tune very directly, whereas Ethernet and TCP/IP are common, and so will obey my rules in my home. I don't expect my modem to perform adblocking, which is why my router does it, and I'm not going to be stupid and try to "uncap" my modem to get more speed, so I don't see a point to being able to provide my own cable modem. As long as I can own the router which provides the only path in and out of my LAN, I can do everything I'm capable of doing anyway, as far as I can see.

Other cable providers (e.g. Comcast) charge you a monthly fee (~$5-15) to rent their modem. Buying a modem gets cost effective pretty quickly.

I think this modem "uncapping" thing has mostly been an urban myth. Maybe there were some really early cable modem systems in the 90s where that would have been possible, but AFAIK with DOCSIS the speed is regulated by the CMTS [0], not the modems.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system

It depends in precisely what CMTS is running, what firmware it has and the ISP's willingness to replace/upgrade old hardware at great expense.

At the last telco I worked for we had about 12 CMTS's, and 2 of them were holding up a bunch of upgrades because of their age. One of the things they specifically couldn't do was provision the speed of the individual circuits.

Unfortunately I had no luck with that - my loose theory is that my EdgeRouter was doing a ping check to see if the IP was already taken before accepting the DHCP lease...

I was able to get "IP passthrough" mode working with the AT&T router though. The key hiccup was that the AT&T router had to be on a different subnet than my router's LAN subnet.

It's been working great since I set it up; highly recommended!

Hardware offloading needs to be enabled and QoS disabled for gigabit speeds (~900Mbps both ways, simultaneous ~500Mbps both ways).

If you send me an email ([email protected]), I can send you my exact configs.

Also, if you didn't need so much bandwidth, is it possible to just order a basic 100Mb/10mb connection for a nominal fee of, say, 30Euro?

The speeds in the US aren't actually that bad, but you're basically forced to pay for everything: paid cable TV, equipment rental fees, etc, and your $40 plan ends up creeping towards $100 / month after the fees and taxes, with increases every year.

What I'm guessing, though, is that 10EUR internet and 200EUR apartment rentals are the equivalent of our $70 internet and $1500 one bedroom apartments when adjusted for salaries.

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPoE

You can call your ISP with any arbitrary piece of non-branded random AliExpress $#@$ of a network eq. and they must walk you through configuring it? That does not make much sense to me.

I do network engineering for a living, so I totally would, but I'm an outlier compared to the rest of the population.

I have never met someone who attempted to install their own cable modem. I do know that the cable modulation standard (DOCSIS) is wildly complicated, so even buying the right type of cable modem for your connection would be challenging. There may also be licensing issues involved that would prevent you from buying such modem completely.

So, I use a SFP module that it suitable for the wavelength and mode of my fiber connection, and plugged that in an Ubiquity Edgerouter. In case of my ISP I had to configure a VLAN on the external interface, as they use separate VLANs for internet, TV and telephony. Once you configure the VLAN, the router will receive an IP address over DHCP and you'll be online.

In my case, I have VZ Fios in the northeast US. Their termination point at my house has an RJ45 Ethernet connection. It goes directly to my pfSense router.

This is brilliant! Why aren't more ISP doing it? I dont want another ONT / Modem / piece of equipment in my flat.

For many people MoCA is more convenient because most houses and apartments are already wired for "cable", ie RG-6 for television purposes. FiOS is offered as a "triple play" service: internet, TV, and phone. Cable is the TV part of that.

There usually isn't an existing Cat 6 connection from the ONT to the living area of the "flat". (Except we don't have "flats" here in the USA). So Verizon will use MoCA to send bits to a more conveniently located wireless access point that they can also supply.

When Verizon installed my FiOS I didn't want to deal with MoCA or their access point, so I had them run Ethernet from the ONT to my den.

I'm not clear on your objection to an ONT. They way GPON works is that the ONT has to be somewhere nearby; if it's not in your flat it still has to be elsewhere in the apartment building.

Just one less pieces of equipment really. Having an RJ45 cable directly to Router is just a much cleaner solution. For those of us living in a extremely small sub 200 Square Feet apartment, getting rid of an equipment results in less cluster.

There's a Huawei ONT fixed to the wall in the cupboard under the stairs, which is owned by the fibre network company.

I have a short length of cat6 connecting that to my own router, and the fibre network company patched the far end to my choice of ISP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband#Technolog...