Systemic Development > Multiple Personality Disorders
Fed up with TWC - what to do, what to do...
richidoo:
Do you watch "Outsourced?"
allenzachary:
You guys are talking about something that is right up my alley. I spent 8 years at TWC as an account executive selling Road Runner to businesses. For the first six years, the company and product steadily improved, actually getting to the point where they were offering competent customer service.
When TWC was spun off from Time Warner Inc, however, everything began to unravel. Part of the spinoff entailed the cable company buying itself out at a cost of billions of dollars. The other part meant that the upper level management at cable was left to its own devices. Changes at TWC have made their customer service worse than ever.
That being said, the Road Runner product is very good, when it works properly. The evening slowdowns are much less likely caused by demand from the neighbors than recurring technical issues at an electronic device on the cable line that services your neighborhood itself. Downstream bandwidth is not a problem for cable. They have a massive capacity. Their soft spot is on upstream, which is very limited compared to downstream (hence 7 Million bits per second down, 384 thousand up). If there was a capacity problem, it would be noticeable when you tried to upload large files.
As Shane said, a rewire of your house is unnecessary. I have seen a bad splitter or a loose fitting cause intermittent havoc, but it wouldn't happen at the same time each day.
mdconnelly:
Allen - great insight. Thanks. In my experience, TWC's biggest problem over the last year or two has been customer service. Technical problems like I've been having should be easily solved - but requires competent tech staff. Sadly, I have had no luck finding them, which brings it right back to customer service. The guy they sent to my house (which of course meant I had to take off work to meet him) was a nice guy - but with absolutely no technical depth beyond knowing how to swap the modem. When I suggested that the problem was not in my house, he was at a loss. I even compiled details stats on download performance vs time-of-day and sent them via my trouble-ticket, but to no avail.
What I suspect is that once Fios or similar high-bandwidth services are made more available, TWC will see customers abandoning ship in droves. Or, they'll get smart and clean up their act... nah, probably not.
Rich - I have seen Outsourced! I'd be extremely happy if TWC's help desk was at least as funny as that show ;-) But, to be honest, most customer service lines start out the same way simply trying to weed out the obvious. You have to be extremely persistent and knowledgeable to get your call escalated. The funny thing was that after I was bounced to two different India help desks, when I got persistent they actually forwarded the call to someone in Durham!
allenzachary:
Alternatives: DSL, but only if you are within about 1500 feet from the DSLAM, the electronic box that provides DSL to your area. If you are farther than that, your service will not be what they advertise. The 30 day free trial would give you the information you need; if it's fast, you are close. Frontier will never tell you the location of a DSLAM. Before you sign up, though,there is a faster way to learn about DSLL. Ask your neighbors how their DSL service works. If they are fast, you will be too.
Satellite is not a viable option for high speed Internet service.
FIOS is a great product and Verizon/Frontier is working hard to deploy it. It is incredibly expensive for them to provision residential neighborhoods. During the housing boom, they were focusing on new developments. They didn't focus on established neighborhoods, apparently because they felt it would be too difficult to supplant the existing services. In new developments, they could sign exclusive deals. When building of new homes slowed to a trickle, so did the emphaisis on spreading FIOS. So if there isn't FIOS where you are now, don't hold your breath.
Since Verizon is the incumbent phone company, your won't see ATT U-Verse there as it's not their territory in which to build. U-Verse is facing similar problems that FIOS is facing anyway.
Before you commit to a new DSL service, you may want to speak with some of your neighbors. Do they use TWC? Have the experienced the same issues? If several neighbors are having the same issue with TWC, you can get their attention by having everyone call with the same complaint, and have them all cite the other addresses where the problem is happening. Don't talk to the overseas folks, insist on speaking to someone relevant. Alternately, when you get to their automated answering system, push "Disconnect service," which will put you in touch with the escalation folks, who usually are local, competent and actually care that you are having issues.
richidoo:
When I have had trouble with DSL over the years I have always had good experience with BellSouth. The last trouble I had was after ATT buyout, but close enough so that it was still BellSouth as usual. I had American agents who acted as middle man to the 2nd tier engineer who fixed the problem while I waited on the phone.
DirecTV also has excellent customer service, in my experience. And I have had my share of technical difficulties trying to make old equipment last too long.
The online forums have been helpful over the years in diagnosing networking and hardware issues with DSL and Sat. For a while DirecTV hardware would freeze when recording local Fox popular shows. Only in certain cities and only on certain channels at certain times. It seemed like my hardware problem, but it wasn't. We stopped recording and watched it live no more problems. I think it was an internal miscreant playing tricks because it eventually stopped. But the forums figured it out. A lot of people like to bitch about their problems, so you can find others with the same technical problem as you. Sometimes they come up with solutions, or pressure the vendor to fix.
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