cablethrowaway
No bio...
User ID: 3996
I think I responded to your original post, great to hear you're getting calls back in this market.
If it helps your decision-making at all, I'm making $50k in a small-med business tech support call center for a major ISP in a mid-large city after working there ~1.5 years, and I started at $41k. My qualifications were a tech-adjacent business bachelor's and a minor in IT heavy on network classes (which I should have majored in from the beginning). To be honest I don't think they looked at my academic creds much, they mostly asked about my phone experience taking pizza orders during the interviews and saw my network knowledge as a bonus.
I will caveat this by saying I am generally an unserious retard and I do not recommend following this path (I like my job now but I got extremely lucky with my current chain of command, which consists of a person that has worked in other coaxial cable industry tech support positions for 8 years immediately above me and another guy that was originally a cable TV field technician that's been with the company over 30 years immediately above them; he may have fixed your parents' cable in the 1990s or 00s if you lived in the carolinas)
cablethrowaway
1mo ago
The technical distinction lies in whether or not the device can operate a DHCP server and provide local IP addresses to multiple clients.
If it can only provide a single public/non-local IP address to a single connected device from whatever media the ISP uses (coax, DSL, fiber, etc), it's a modem (or ONU/ONT for fiber because the fiber people get REALLY mad if you refer to an ONU as a modem 🙄 since they technically don't modulate or demodulate but they otherwise perform the exact same functions as a modem, converting <ISP media> into ethernet 🙄🙄🙄).
If it can provide DHCP local addresses to more than one client device, it's a router. Regardless of whether it broadcasts wifi or not.
If it does both things, it's a combo modem/router, typically called a "gateway" in industry.
cablethrowaway
1mo ago
Well, at least your American Intel hardware is safe from this regulation.
If you think that ipv6 arrangement is weird, ours is weirder. Ipv6 is bog standard for our residential service but completely and utterly unsupported and undocumented for business class service (which is what I support and does run on separate infrastructure for the relevant parts). All I can say is try /56 and if that doesn't work try /64. They give us nothing as far as docs go and implementation varies by region. Certain areas still don't have it at all. This may be intentional so they can upsell ipv6-ready enterprise DIA/FIA, but it's probably more corporate incompetence/fragmentation (we are made up of many dozens of independent cable systems bought out over the years after all) than anything else. Officially, we cannot offer any assistance for ipv6 on business class connections. Most of my coworkers barely know what it is, and I'm embarrassingly rusty on it myself.
We can set custom DNS on our provided CPE though, at least.
cablethrowaway
1mo ago
Hah, (some of) the ISPs are way ahead of you. We'll lease you a router for $10 a month where the only available settings are SSID, password, port forwarding, and a UPnP toggle switch (thankfully off by default). Management is cloud-based (no local GUI) and updates are automatic. People HATE the lack of setting availability, and I don't blame them for it. Can't change the subnet from the default 192.168.1.1/24, and no we cannot override it in tech support, we have the same options as those available to the end user.
The company line is to buy your own router if you need access to other settings, but that's about to become a lot harder.
At the same time, this is probably Good For The Normies overall from a security standpoint.
As mentioned below, there seems to be a wide exemption for anything not marketed at the consumer level. I will be very curious to see how that ends up being applied to hardware leased or provided to end users by their ISP. I'm guessing the exemption will apply to those units even though the hardware and firmware is of foreign origin, because the ISPs plausibly have access to/control over the firmware.
The bulk of my employer's (major US cable company) current generation of leased routers are white label units with our branding and custom exterior shell but manufactured by a subsidiary of Asus based on a generic router board that they also supply to other ISPs in a similar arrangement, at least from what I've gathered looking at the manuals and the Asus website counterparts.
The other major OEMs that made our previous gen routers/modems (and still make our current gen standalone modems), Hitron and Ubee, are also both Taiwanese. Arris was nominally American, even after their acquisition by Commscope (also American), but their manufacturing was overseas and they were recently divested to Vantiva (French, f.k.a. Technicolor, which is also where Cisco/Scientific Atlanta's coax division ended up).
A side note, it would probably be better for our reputation if we just told customers we were giving them Asus hardware rather than using our own branding. Cable companies are funny.
cablethrowaway
2mo ago
That was originally just for carrier-grade network equipment iirc, then later expanded to cover basically everything made by Huawei. I think ZTE was also included in the expanded ban (another Chinese telecom vendor).
This is kinda the opposite, apparently targeting consumer-grade hardware only. Which is kinda weird.
cablethrowaway
2mo ago
Wow, that kind of hit rate on interviews even with a CCNA?
I was in a similar boat minus the certs a couple years ago and after 6 months of looking post-graduation I took a job in a business tech support call center for an ISP. The pay absolutely sucks and getting screamed at by customers also sucks but it was one of two places that didn't ghost me out of 75ish applications, and the other place (an MSP) would have paid even less, comparable to McDonald's pay in a hcol area.
cablethrowaway
3mo ago
I suspect anything more uniform-like would be quickly pattern-matched to Nazi SS stuff
cablethrowaway
5mo ago
The Vela incident was almost certainly an Israeli nuclear test.
cablethrowaway
5mo ago
This would be great for me; Netflix is the *only* streaming service that I don't already get for free through my employer (see username)
Pretty much all of the others are affiliated with legacy media publishers/broadcasters (ie HBO and Warner up until this buy-out) and in turn have relationships with the cable companies.
I will be very disappointed if I lose my free HBO lol
It has gotten substantially trickier on iPhones, starting with the X. Same overall process but it's very easy to accidentally damage the face ID hardware/ribbon cables, which permanently locks you out of using face ID ever again on that phone without sending it to Apple to replace both the face ID board AND the entire motherboard. Which costs more than the resale value of the phone itself.
The same "touch it and it bricks permanently" issue existed on touch ID iphones, but the placement of the face ID sensors and ribbon cable makes it even easier to accidentally break.
cablethrowaway
6mo ago
Yeah, I doubt covid has anything to do with it frankly. It's almost certainly just the dropping of standardized testing as an admit requirement.
It was not my first choice, but it was the best out of available options. I got an offer from an MSP in the same city but it would have paid significantly less than $20 an hour. The ISP at least paid a somewhat liveable wage for the area CoL. Plus I've always kinda liked the idea of working for a national infrastructure-type company, which helped me swallow the situation, I just didn't figure I'd end up in a call center. So it goes, for gen z. Those were the only two offers I got in 6 months of looking, though I wasn't grinding as hard as I could have been with applications.
At one point I was considering trying to switch to a field tech role with my current employer, which I still haven't ruled out completely. They are well-compensated in our company (for what the job entails) and can hit well north of 70k (more in HCOL or unionized areas) after just 2 years on the job if you know what you're doing without even having to re-interview just by passing tests, with room to move up beyond that into interviewed positions. I'm not exactly in shape but I'm skinny and wouldn't have any issues climbing utility ladders or working 48 inches below distribution voltage. I'd have to learn how to drill into masonry though. A significant cohort of my call center colleagues are older guys that used to be business class field techs, they say it's a mixed bag.
I could (and have been encouraged to) promote into our Enterprise division tech support for a significant pay bump (~60k starting with room to advance based on test results since I'd be able to stack it on my existing pay grade) but they run that shit like an actual sweatshop, exactly what people think of when they hear "call center", which would be a massive quality of life downgrade from my current department which is run by mostly sane and reasonable humans. I'm hoping that department will cool down and stabilize within the next year and become tolerable to work for, at which point I will make the jump.
And before anyone tries to tell me I'm going to be replaced by an AI agent, yes, I probably am, but not for at least another 10 years because this company is so ridiculously inefficient and nepotistic and incompetent that we're more likely to see AGI first. We are a fucking dinosaur corp. (Not Comcast, the other one. Though I have it on good authority that Comcast is basically just as bad [plus, fun fact, they use the exact same back end biller/accounting-provisioning system that we use; CSG International])
At the very least I'm getting experience with BMC Remedy, which we use for bigboy real problems that are outside the scope of our in-house internal ticket systems designed to cover routine issues.
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