Comcast/Xfinity vs Frontier

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OpenSource Ghost

Limp Gawd
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Feb 14, 2022
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Comast/Xfinity recently laid coax cable and put a bunch of Fiber Optic Cable Warning stumps next to almost every house in my area. Their offer (no contract + my own modem + $30 for not having a cap) is much cheaper than my current ISP's monthly $150 for gigabit cable connection that provides 650Mbps at best, no matter what speed test I run (TCP or UDP).

Another ISP I can get is Frontier, but I don't know if they suck... or not?

Most of my traffic is over WireGuard (UDP) and I want to make sure UDP traffic is not throttled by whichever company I pick.
 
Almost all ISPs suck. It's certainly a requirement for being an ISP with presence in many states.

If it's no contract, try it and see if you like it. Keep in mind most residential service is heavily biased towards downloads, and they often don't even advertise their upload speeds. If that's important to you, you need to pay close attention. If it's not, it's not.

I know wireguard can switch networks, so you could pretty easily setup a failover system, but does it also support multipath, where you'd balance traffic over multiple connections? That might be nice.
 
I don't upload much of anything and store any and all big files locally. My current ISP's upload speed is 50Mb/sec and it looks like Xfinity's 1.0Gbps plan is limited to 35Mbit/sec. I think Frontier's upload speed for the same plan is much higher, but their website is just as shady as Xfinity's. Big tech ISP's hide everything in their contract so deep that only bills shed the truth.

Is there a trust-worthy site for proper ISP reviews? I don't even know a credible site that can actually list all available ISP's in my area for my street address.

What I like now the most about current ISP is that I can play online games over WireGuard VPN (NordVPN NordLynx) with 35-50ms latency. Its not perfect, but my latency without VPN is almost the samet. Download speeds over WireGuard are strange... I posted about it earlier. Basically, upon connecting, my speed test results can be in 450-500Mbit/sec range or in 200-250Mbit/sec range when connecting to the same server. I have to cycle server (in the same location) a few times to get the 450-500Mbit/sec bandwidth. It may have something to do with peering nature of WireGuard or my ISP simply throttles UDP traffic and has technicians who get paid $100 per visit just for resetting ISP gateway (without asking for permission...) and testing TCP-only bandwidth while blaming everything on VPN...
 
OpenSource Ghost said:
Is there a trust-worthy site for proper ISP reviews?
Click to expand...

BroadbandReports (formerly DSL Reports) is ok, but ISP reviews are kind of tricky. There are so many local factors that make a difference, and your specific traffic mix makes a difference too.

If you really want to find out why things are slow, you need to have detailed information about both ends of the connection and at least some information about the middle. Things get really hard to track down when you've got link aggregation on multiple places at the path. Most networks don't actually balance traffic over link aggregation, instead they hash the ips and ports to select which link to use. Sometimes one link is congested or dirty and losing packets; cycling your connection will change your port and may put you on a better link. Not all the networks have great monitoring. If you've got a 4x 100g connection and aggregated data shows 200g of traffic, that looks like lots of spare capacity; but maybe one link is at 100g and the others are at 33g each and something isn't well distributed for weird reasons and needs kicking. If this link isn't at your ISP or your vpn server or their ISP, but is instead at the ISP of an ISP, it's hard to get a ticket to the right place to get it investigated. Just cycle the connection and move on with your life.

No surprise that your ISP doesn't want to deal with your VPN though. They have no visibility into the many potential issues on the other side of that. I'm sure your VPN doesn't want to deal with connectivity debugging either. It's a giant pain.
 
The issue I described to my current ISP was that UDP traffic was throttled to about 500Mbit/sec without any use of VPN. As soon as I said that UDP traffic was important to me because UDP was used for my VPN and VPN bandwidth was capped at the same 450Mbit/sec due to ISP's throttling (not VPN provider's), the tech immediately dismissed the issue as VPN issue... I tested my VPN with a different provider that didn't throttle UDP bandwidth and my VPN bandwidth was at about 820Mbit/sec. In other words, the issue was with existing provider throttling UDP bandwidth, not VPN, but they didn't bother listening.

There is another small-time local-only fiber optic ISP servicing only a few local zip codes and their tech support is excellent. They have no problem going into details of networking and dispatching actual engineers to troubleshoot problems. They mostly service businesses. The main issue is that you pay for everything, including week-long digging and provision of their fiber optic cable to your house without any use of coax cable. Xfinity doesn't do that. It connects to coax cable from your house to a local fiber optic device that is outside.
 
toast0 said:
Almost all ISPs suck. It's certainly a requirement for being an ISP with presence in many states.
Click to expand...
No, they all do. I've dealt with about 5x isps in the last 10 years including comcast, and they all suck when you need any type of service on the connection. And when it works, it's usually okay until something goes wrong and then you deal with the issues dealing with service or hope that someone else has gone through the headaches and yours will be fixed when theirs is.

The best way to evaluate different isps, especially if you can have them connected at the same time is to simply have more than one at one time. So then you're able to do tests in real time for what you're looking for. Latency will be worse on coax based isps, while fibre is usually better and also symmetrical to boot. If you already have a fibre symmetrical connection, going to even a gig plan over coax is a big step down imo.

I'd be very wary about trying to fix an issue with an isp unless you actually have something not working the way you need it--service, price, equipment, etc. Changing an isp is probably starting to get into divorce territory in terms of how much pain a former isp will try to cause you. And don't forget the scenario where you have to come crawling back--not pretty.

If it's just the price of your current service provider that you want to change, I would just call up and let them know that there's competition that has similar services for cheaper and ask them what they can do--usually they'll knock off $10/mo just for asking and imo that's an easy way to offset any pains of comparing any competitors in the first place.
 
toast0 said:
Almost all ISPs suck. It's certainly a requirement for being an ISP with presence in many states.
Click to expand...
SamirD said:
No, they all do. I've dealt with about 5x isps in the last 10 years including comcast, and they all suck when you need any type of service on the connection. And when it works, it's usually okay until something goes wrong and then you deal with the issues dealing with service or hope that someone else has gone through the headaches and yours will be fixed when theirs is.

If it's just the price of your current service provider that you want to change, I would just call up and let them know that there's competition that has similar services for cheaper and ask them what they can do--usually they'll knock off $10/mo just for asking and imo that's an easy way to offset any pains of comparing any competitors in the first place.
Click to expand...
^^THIS^^

Sure, they will sign you up in a heartbeat, but if you need anything once connected...

Comcrast = suks wallah
Frontier = same
Time Warnering = same

Competition offering lower prices ? good luck getting them to give a sh^t, let alone adjusting their prices to match...

shall I continue ?
 
Comcast is literally the only option above 100mbps available to me.
So, no matter how awful they are (and they're awful)... I'm fucking stuck.
 
In my area, I switched from Comcast to Frontier back in like novemeber after Frontier laid down fiber.
Was paying $200+ for comcast and TV. (Required to have a TV plan) for the 1gbps down and 35mb up.

Paying Frontier 65.99 for gigabit symmetrical, and now they offer 2gb for $100. And 5gb for $150. Going to get the 2gb on a month or so.
 
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