isp
my old isp sprint broadband was okay for a long time. then it became the suck. they'd have short outages. each outage caused the modem to boost its gain a little bit to try and compensate. the gain never got turned down. so eventually it pegged at maximum. at that setting the modem would think background noise was someone else's encrypted signal. so it would wait patiently forever before sending out any packets. then i'd have to power cycle the modem. running at max gain slowly cooked the modem so it needed to boost its gain faster. a death spiral. so now i have speakeasy dsl. great policy. and more bits up and down for the same cost. yay!