In Seattle, CenturyLink has sold off its fiber business to AT&T Quantum Fiber. Recently I got caught up unwillingly in the latest of this enshittification saga. About a month ago, there was a power outage at the house, which knocked out the ONT for my fiber connection, a Calix 711GE. It wouldn’t power on anymore despite my best troubleshooting efforts.

Due to the corporate changes at CenturyLink, they wouldn’t be able to send a support tech out to me until I went over to Quantum and setup a new account with them. Mind you that they’ve been collecting billing from me all along, so let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that, at some point along the way, someone made a decision that it would be better to wait for the customer to have a time-sensitive net outage and that this would be the best time to play a few rounds of Not My Bailiwick. Fantastic.

After all that, they sent someone out who was able to bring it back up. Problem solved, and I moved along with my life this past month. Fixed forever. The end.

Fast forward to… the next power outage, which happened a week ago. This unfortunately knocked the ONT again, and I troubleshooted it… again. With very few exceptions, This ONT has been humming along for like 8 years or so without any problems and performance has been generally awesome. It’s important to note this was the case even after I fully switched to Quantum Fiber a month ago. Hold onto that thought.

So again, they send out another very nice tech who basically says that these ONTs are all old (fair enough, old things get old) and are being replaced with SmartNIDs. Quantum can’t repair or replace them anymore, but we can put the new thing in the home and remove a layer of troubleshooting abstraction in the future. I say, sure that sounds great.

Gosh, was that ever a mistake! I should have kept the ONT.

The hardware that I was provided with is the Q1000K, which I’ve since discovered is infamous. Infamously bad.

I put the device into transparent bridge mode so that it could talk directly to my pfSense hardware, and sure enough, I had all the problems that people were complaining about. Massive consistent lag spikes, generally higher ping than I was getting through the ONT, really buggy management software on the Q1000K. If you put it into bridge mode, you can’t even manage it anymore without factory resetting it, and sometimes apparently you need to do that randomly. They recently released a firmware update that broke the ability to offload the VLAN tagging to the pfSense which supposedly would have supposedly resolved most of the latency issues. Will any of this ever get fixed? Who is to say? 🤷‍♂️

Setting all of that aside, IPV6 resolution via the 6rd tunnel straight up doesn’t work at all, although I am able to get an address. But hey, reduced surface area for troubleshooting points straight at the Q1000K. At this point, I’m just annoyed. The problem isn’t the net infrastructure outside; it’s probably still working just fine for my neighbors. The problem is this piece of trash hardware I’ve been allocated.

I guess I’ll contact their support, but hey, Quantum Fiber… a month with you and I’m very unimpressed, and I want my ONT back.

As an aside: Companies really need to be looking on reddit and elsewhere to understand the problems that matter to their users, and then they need to use that information to inform development of the services they are running.