I have a 1 Gbps connection with an ISP that rents another telecommunications company’s fiber. That telecom owns the ONT in my apartment.
I had an electrician fix the heated floor in my bathroom a few weeks ago. He had to turn off the main breaker for safety reasons, which also cut power to the ONT. After turning the power back on, my speeds had dropped from 1 Gbps to circa 100 Mbps. I filed a ticket with my ISP, who resolved the issue by having the telecom do something at their end, they said. (Sounds software-y/configuration-y.)
Yesterday, I f*cked my router (a raspberry pi with openwrt) up by flashing the latest pre-release firmware on it. I lost all connections and the Pi wouldn’t recognize any of its hardware interfaces. As part or my “routine”, I rebooted my devices in this order: my APs, my routers and, lastly, my ONT. After some diagnosing, I identified that the problem was indeed the new firmware on the router/Pi. But then I noticed that my speeds had dropped, so I gauged the speeds directly at the ONT and, lo and behold, they were down to 100 Mbps again. I have, yet again, filed a ticked with my ISP, waiting to hear from them now.
My question, just out of curiosity, to those of you that have the knowledge/experience: what could be going on the telecom’s end? Is there a correlation/plausible technical explanation between my connection speeds dropping and restarting or cutting the power to the ONT?
I can’t say for certain that this is what is happening, but it would fit.
I work for an ISP and deal with problems like this a lot.
In our system, we have a master keeper of information. We call it “The Biller”. It keeps all the records of what services you have and at what tiers.
Then, there’s the fiber optic equipment. There’s a small building somewhere near your area that houses the equipment on the other end of your fiber optic line.
By default, the biller and the fiber optic equipment don’t communicate with eachother, so there’s some middleware software that ‘provisions’ the service automatically.
When I get these kinds of complaints, there’s generally some software glitch or misconfiguration in either the biller or the provisioning software. When provisioning is triggered, the middleware queries the biller for the information about your service (what services do you have [TV, data, phone?], what are their features [channel lineups, speed profile, calling plan, etc], what equipment is used to deliver that service [ONT serial number, etc]) and it builds a configuration file that gets sent to the fiber optic frame equipment in your area to set those services up on the device you have in your home.
For some reason, when you reboot your ONT and it fetches a configuration file from the OLT, that configuration file is saying you should only get 100Mbps. When you call in to support, my bet is the support agent is manually fixing the speed profile on the OLT without looking into why the OLT is getting the wrong speed profile.
It’s likely an issue with your account, and unfortunately it’s squeaky wheels that get the grease. If you want this resolved, I would recommend making it happen a lot one day. Just keep rebooting your ONT and calling in to support. Eventually, someone will find and fix the problem.
Thank you so much for sharing your first hand experience! I’ll make sure to point out when they contact me that this can’t keep happening every time there’s a reboot.