ISPs are the root of all evil
How much do you pay your ISP each month? $50? $100? Whatever the amount, it’s a lot.
Internet is the only service I can think of where we spend over $50/month and have no way to see the quality of service we’re getting. There’s no transparency when it comes to your internet service. It could be down all night and you wouldn’t know. And your ISP is certainly not going to notify you about it.
You have more visibility into mundane services like water and garbage than your internet service. At least with your water service you can inspect the water before drinking it and with your garbage service you see the garbage man (or woman) picking up your garbage. You can even say hello to them if you like.
What are your options?
How can you inspect your internet service? Run a speed test? A speed test tells you your bandwidth at one point in time from a single location. Not exactly what we would call a real-world scenario.
ISPs are constantly taking shortcuts. And because they have no accountability (after all no one is actually monitoring the quality of service they’re providing customers), as long as your internet service isn’t completely down, the majority of customers won’t know the difference and for those that can tell - well, good luck dealing with your ISP’s tech support department. That’s its own special nightmare.
My favorite part about calling ISP tech support is telling them that I’m a network engineer and then patiently explaining why rebooting my router and their modem isn’t going to do anything about their packet loss to netflix.com.
So what can be done about this?
It’s time to take power back from the ISP. For one, it’s not so difficult to monitor the quality of your internet service if you know what to look for and have the right tools.
The first thing to keep in mind is that 90% of bandwidth issues are due to either packet-loss or network latency due to bad routing. Both of these scenarios can be identified though PING-based measurements.
The second thing you’ll need is irrefutable proof to show your ISP’s tech support staff highlight that there’s an issue with THEIR network and not yours. We make this as trivial as a one-click button press.
A couple of things worth calling out about our Connection Health Report.
1. Notice how we highlight the health of your router and modem first. That will be the first place tech support will look. They are trained to focus on your side of the network equation because that is where the majority of tech support issues end up.
2. We show a timeline view of the last 15 days of connectivity. This is important to show that everything was working fine earlier and to point out exactly when you started experiencing issues.
