Spectrum internet DNS changes
Most of you probably won't know what I'm talking about, but I'm putting this out there just because. I work in IT and I find this highly suspicious. Forgive the rant.
A few months ago I started noticing my home internet was being extra shitty. It'd work normally for a few hours, then randomly just quit responding for a while. I understand that this is the norm for some people, but I've had Spectrum in my same location for over 6 years now and this particular annoyance is a very new thing for me.
For as long as I can remember, Spectrum's Reno DNS servers have been verifiably geolocated in the Reno area. Makes sense, right? Now, suddenly, DNS services are being provided from COUDERSPORT FUCKING PENNSYLVANIA. Now any network engineer will tell you that there are times when routing traffic to a different stack is beneficial, but most would agree that routing all the way across the country just for Domain Name services is generally sub-optimal. (For those who don't know, Domain Name Servers are what translates your request to go to "youtube.com" to what ever the actual IP address of Youtube is. They're generally meant to be one of the first hops in the chain, and you generally want them to be low latency.)
When I contacted Spectrum support to point this out/ask questions/complain, I got put on an immediate runaround with someone who kept suggesting I have a technician come out to check my connection. When I told them that it wasn't a connection problem and that I had experience working with IT systems, I got a very dismissive reply of "oh, don't the systems you work on tell you this stuff?"
There are a few things that bug me about this, in no particular order.
This has notably lowered performance and latency and results in periods of effectively total network loss on a daily basis.
There's no legitimate reason to route your customers' traffic across the country like this.
Coudersport, PA was previously slated to be the site of a brand new Palantir datacenter, which is officially currently on hold with "no official plans" but there are several other datacenters being built in the general area.
The customer support "person" (probably a bot) was very dismissive after I explained what the actual issue was in more technical detail, as if it were intentionally wasting my time.
ANYWAY! If you've noticed Spectrum getting worse in the past few months, or if you just feel so inclined, open a command prompt or your network settings and look for DNS server addresses. If it starts with 71.10, congratulations, you're still using the OG Reno servers. If it starts with some 209.18 bullshit, you're being shunted to Dickandballs Pennsylvania. I manually set mine back to the Reno servers, and like magic, all of my internet problems went away.
OG Server IPs:
71.10.216.1
71.10.216.2