Fixing Awful, Horrible Internet Service

Conservatively, 99% of Americans hate their internet service provider. Because so many residential locations only have a single high-speed internet option available, there is no competition and no incentive for them to provide fast or reliable service. Comcast is notorious for its poor service and their usual solution if the internet is out is to tell customers to reset their modems. So, Jon Bringus created a device that does that job automatically.

In theory, a modern modem should be capable of effectively “resetting” itself to fix issues. That’s usually just forcing a dynamic IP address refresh, which is a simple thing to do without a hard power cycling. But for some reason that only network admins with ancient and mystical wisdom understand, power cycling is still a common tactic that actually works. Bringus’s device simply does that on its own without his direct involvement.

The first step is detecting an outage. The device contains a LuckFox Pico Plus single-board computer, which connects to the modem (or router) via Ethernet. A simple Python script regularly pings Google and listens for a response. If the responses are very slow or don’t come at all, that indicates an outage.

When it detects an outage, the LuckFox Pico Plus flips a relay to disconnect power to the modem. It then waits a few seconds and flips the relay back on. In practice, that is exactly the same as unplugging the modem and then plugging it back in.

And that does work, even though such barbaric practices shouldn’t be necessary. The hard reset causes the modem to request a new dynamic IP from Comcast, which usually solves the problem and gets Bringus back online.