About a week ago, my home Internet (AT&T Fiber) went from the ~1 Gbps I pay for down to about 100 Mbps (see how I monitor my home Internet with a Pi). It wasn't too inconvenient, and I considered waiting it out to see if the speed recovered at some point, because latency was fine.
But as you can see around 7/7 on that graph, the 100 Mbps went down to about eight, and that's the point where my wife starts noticing how slow the Internet is. Action level.
So I fired up AT&T's support chat. I'm a programmer, I can usually find ways around the wily ways of chatbots.
Except AT&T's AI-powered chatbot seems to have a fiendish tendency to equate 'WiFi' with 'Internet', no doubt due to so many people thinking they are one and the same.
We were stuck in that loop for about 5 minutes.
It looks like you're having trouble with your WiFi.
No.
After working a few different angles, I finally 'spammed 0'1 by entering some variation of 'connect me to a support rep'.
I'll cut to the chase—after repeating some variation of that about 8 times, eventually I got queued up in the 20 minute line to a human support rep.
Unfortunately for me, the human support rep, like so many in the industry, promptly ignored the data I provided in my first chat message to him2, and told me switching WiFi channels on the device (on which WiFi is currently disabled completely) would solve my issue. At no cost.
Maybe I should welcome our AI overlords?
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In the old days of phone support, if you got stuck in the automated menus, you could resort to spamming '0', and in most systems that weren't set up by nefarious managerial overlords, that would get you to a human. Eventually. ↩︎
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The entire contents of my message, prior to his turned-off-WiFi channel twiddling: "Hello! I just received and installed the new AT&T router/fiber modem, and ... the Internet speed is just as slow as before. I pay for 1 Gbps symmetric, and I'm getting 8 Mbps down and 6 Mbps up. On 6/28, the average connection speed went from 1 Gbps down to 100 Mbps. On 7/8 the average speed went from 100 Mbps to 8 Mbps. This is all measured both on the device at the fiber, and through a separate monitor I have wired into the 1 Gbps network." ↩︎
Comments
My guess is this will become even worse in the future.
Corporate greed gets worse every year, so who knows how long there will even be any human reps left?
"Just tie ChatGPT, speech recognition, and text2speech together and we can save about 5 more annual salaries"
-- any bad manager ever
It also scares me how most ISPs are these dark and soulless corporations, where nobody really knows what's going on, but they somehow have the absolute power over your private network.
There's a good read about this here: https://samcurry.net/hacking-millions-of-modems
this chatbot is not AI
The chatgpt isn't AI either.
That is not an AI/LLM, that's a decision tree program. You of all people should have easily spotted that.
Even my 900m models can catch the nuance in slow internet, not wifi.
Since when are decision trees not AI? They’re part of the ML toolkit even if they don’t have fancy LLM powering them.
decision trees while part of the toolkit atleast in scikit library are not the same type of AI, they have little variation. anything thats not a Large language model made with transformers library should not be trusted as customer service. take for example if you make a random forest classifier with scikit, and run it with the same settings twice on the same data, depending on your data, atleast in my case the output was the same both times. if the same input always generates the same output, then chances are that AI is kinda worthless especially for customer service. if you had the full chat log and the same conditions i bet you could ask that chatbot the exact same questions, and it would give you all the same answers. assuming you spelled everything exactly the same, and made sure the input was 100% the same as the original from start to finish according to the chatlog.
For some reason, this pattern looks like a bad cable somewhere between their equipment and your router (1000 -> 100 -> 10), take a look at the negotiated speed of the link between devices (ethtool etc.). Since you mentioned in the notes you checked at the fiber level, perhaps some cable in their network cabinet somewhere in your neighborhood?
Apparently AT&T had switched my service from 1000 Mbps Fiber to 6 Mbps DSL/U-Verse without any notification (the technician said he's seen it happen before, it is a glitch that sometimes happens between their four separate billing/admin systems :/).
I see that you were hit by the "Failure by design" error. You have my sympathies. :)