My tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory is that ISPs switch peoples' Internet off intermittently to see if anyone notices and save on bandwidth. And they only switch it back on when you call in to tech support.

The number of times I've had Internet issues, restarted my modem and router and have it not fix the problem, but when I restart them when I'm on the phone with tech support and it magically fixes the problem just makes me so damn suspicious...

[–] SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

They probably are just incompetent. Killing internet to someone not using it wouldn't really save anything. I've had the same service provider for 5 years and only had one interruption due to a downed pole or something. Cox and Comcast though, CONSTANT issues.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 months ago

They don't need to, they already use overprovisioning for bandwidth.

It's only in rare cases where the backend is so old and limited that it only supports a specific maximum number of active clients that they do that, and I've only heard about it in rural areas and similar places