Dealing with the ridiculously limited upload speed, the outages, the locked router. The 40 minutes it takes on the phone to get it disconnected. Their constant attempts at upselling you cell phone plans and other terrible tech you’d never consider.
Truly, Fios is the most bare minimum. And there are much better options if you can pay commercial rates (stealth.net! Pilot!).
Truly embarrassing and sad.
Installation alone was phenomenal. This is probably largely downstream of NYC allowing a sprawl of overhead wiring in many neighborhoods, but I was deeply impressed by an installation team building out an entirely new fiber line to our apartment within less than 48 hours of putting in the order, for free, climbing through backyards and drilling exterior walls and everything.
They did physically cut the existing Spectrum cable to the apartment for absolutely no reason, so maybe playing fair competitively isn't quite there yet, but all in all, the dynamic between the two providers seems to create very good outcomes for end users there.
Of course, if your landlord does not allow any of that (common if you live in a larger building in NYC) and you're stuck with a monopoly, your experience can be miserable, so this probably really only works as a strategy if you enforce access and accept overbuild as an outcome.
Sonic in the Bay Area. An old mom-and-pop ISP that just never sold out but kept growing organically, that now has a large share of the Bay Area fiber-to-the-home market.
Now you can get 10Gbps fiber in some of their rollouts.
Service is pretty good though.
Out on the west coast I’ve generally been fine with spectrum modulo the upload speed although they’ve did a recent upgrade to 100mbit/s+ due to new DOCSIS standards. I finally got Fiber in SF so I switched but Spectrum was finally kind of good enough for the most part.
At my house now we get 2 gigs up and down with fiber from Optimum for cheaper than the plan we had from Spectrum. We've had maybe two hours of downtime total from outages in 16-17 months, compared to probably 4-5x as much in the same period on average from Spectrum. Some providers really do just suck.
I don’t know why I got down voted so hard for saying I’ve generally not had spectrum going down regularly or that you don’t have to rent their modem. I used to hate Comcast too but in my opinion they’ve improved a lot so I’m not unhappy despite leaving them as a customer.