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Comment by pdonis | Hacker News Reader

> 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".

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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.

> we check for sync or if PPPoE is up.

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".

> My ISP does

Out of curiosity, which ISP do you have?

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.

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