they have been a few times
Corporations are always sorry about the inconvenience as they take your problem seriously; I take my problem seriously, so I decided to share it with the world!
Our home internet connection is provided by Time Warner’s Road Runner service. We have subscribed to the Extreme feature, yielding 10 mbps… at least on paper. In reality, we have had an extremely unreliable connection paired with Time Warner’s abysmal support. Dealing with them is such a mind numbing experience words can’t describe the incompetence of their staff. To make matters even worse, we are not talking about a company in business to rip its customers off, like Verizon, but rather a genuine failure at almost every level of support.
Advertising rule #1: Lie
The Extreme Roadrunner service is supposed to let me “move at the cutting edge of today’s technology”; According to Time Warner, the edge is at 10 mbps, which is 20% faster than their equipment. Yes, they are selling a 10mb connection hooked to a server that can deliver up to 8190kb/sec.
They have fulfilled advertising rule number #1: Lie to the customer about what he is going to get; in this case the offer overstates their capability by twenty percent for my area. To their defense, it is probably written somewhere in a half-point font that this is a fantasy rate and we should be thrilled to get 1kb/sec. Usually the rule #2 is to lie about the price, but unlike my experience with Verizon, I found them very honest; As I wrote in the introduction, Time Warner does not really steal from people, but they just hire incompetent clowns.
The Roadrunner experience in numbers
After more than 7 months of service, this is how our experience of the Roadrunner service can be summarized :
| Advertised speed | 10mbps |
| Real speed in dry weather | 1 to 7 mbps |
| Real speed during rain | <1 mbps |
| Average speed | 2.5 mbps |
| Computers tried | 4 |
| Modems tried | 4 |
| Cables laid out | 1 original + 3 new sets |
| Technicians dispatched | 12 |
| Time on the phone | >15 hours |
what is really wrong?
In a nutshell, the speed of the service will vary considerably and randomly. It might bounce from 1mb/s to 6mb/s in a matter of minutes… or hours. It is utterly random. I have performed tests with numerous services, such as speedtest.net, speakeasy.net, broadbandreports.com as well as written my own test and tried it from this server as well as my office (both having connections dwarfing a home service, so they are not a bottleneck).
Basically the only constants are: speed sucks most of the time, and if it rains the service will barely work, or even fail.
So much equipment has been tried (4 PCs, one of them with 2 network cards, 4 modems, 4 sets of cables, etc) that Time Warner should get a clue that the problem doesn’t happen at my house.
In fact, if the connection doesn’t work when it rains, and I swear it doesn’t rain inside our place, they should get a stronger clue that the problem is somewhere outside. Impervious to any facts, support’s best shot usually consists of restarting the modem, followed by sending what they call a technician.
Time Warner’s roster
The structure is divided in four classes; each of them seems to have been bred separately: they are very different from one another, yet every specimen is identical to its peers within its own class.
They are the infantry of support. Their task is to fend off customers that don’t know their PC has to be turned on to use it. The will provide basic troubleshooting, such as: restart everything and see what happens. Any discussion with them is futile as they do not have any real understanding of the technology they are trying to support. They read instructions, ask you to follow them and when your problem is not solved, they pass you on.
Even though I have accumulated a considerable number of hours with Time Warner’s minions, I have never understood the role of this support level 2. I guess they’re here to type note and entertain you until you can reach someone of the next level. They don’t seem to possess any more skills than the previous level.
Ok, to be fair I have to say this is where the smart people reside. You can have a normal discussion about networks and they will understand. The issue I have been calling about being totally intermittent, they have been able to spot some problems sometimes, but not always. Ultimately, they all came up with different explanations (problems at the head, problems in the optic fiber, etc) and none of them yielded any results. I might theorize that they rely too much on the next class.
A very interesting category by itself: They project a ‘no problem, I can handle it’ image combined with the most radical incompetence I have seen. In fact I don’t think most of them would have the skills to work at McDonalds. Short of drilling holes in the walls and stapling cables, they are unequivocally the most clueless people of the whole organization. I have seen some unable to use a computer to even check if the connection was working properly. Usually they show up with no idea why they were sent; all the time spent with people over the phone doesn’t mean anything until the info is passed along. The last one did not know how to test the connection’s speed, but they all managed to humiliate themselves one way or another. I am not sure what criteria Time Warner uses when it comes to hire these numbskulls, but I’m sure you pass if you show you can hold a drill from the right side. English proficiency is definitely not a criteria.
They are pretty typical: deny the problem until proven wrong. At this point, they offer something ridiculous seasoned with one of the few most common lies of the corporate American culture, such as: I am sorry (yeah, right), I can only / cannot do this (suuure), I don’t see anything wrong (as if you even looked). To add insult to injury, they have to repeat these stupid sentences about excellent service or ask you if they can help you with anything else, after they didn’t help you with the first thing, etc. Just typical…
But the list wouldn’t be complete without the phone system: To reach a technician, you will wait over 2 minutes before being transferred to the queue and be told 3 times your modem’s MAC address. This is after calling the local number as the 1-800 refuses to put me through. Why? It claims we are calling from an ‘out of area number’. I guess their phone system cannot get our number… did I mention that the phone service is through Time Warner too?
Quotes
Maybe I should set a hidden camera in our office room; the field technicians can come up with some pretty good lines sometimes:
- Can you sign up my work sheet? My friend is waiting for me to go to lunch
- To have high speed, you need a fixed IP
- 3mbps is fast enough!
- Why don’t you sign up for a slower service? That way you will pay for what you have right now
- I removed the old cable, but I don’t have the right drill to put the new one so I cannot finish today
- This is a free world, there are other internet providers. If we haven’t managed to fix it so far, it will continue
- I see the problem, it is the splitter! (a new splitter later) I have no idea why it doesn’t work
- Do you know a website to check the speed?
- It’s the router causing the problem! (I show the router is not plugged in) I have to call my supervisor to see if he knows
- It doesn’t rain anymore, so your internet will be fine!
- Why do you have a router if you don’t use wireless?
- the wireless signal is slower, that’s why it’s slow (no it’s not slower and I don’t even use it)
and I don’t remember most of them. The phone people were pretty funny too, reciting nonsense, being rude sometimes when you prove them wrong, etc. Not to mention they managed to disconnect my TV service an set up the wrong speed while doing changes on my account.
Good mention
Out of this putrid mess, I had to deal with one person that took the problem seriously, was friendly and smart. His name was Ryan W; unfortunately the troubleshooting didn’t go far enough to prove useful.
He found that there was an issue between a network card I had and the modem; I did more tests after and it turned out to happen with Vista and a specific network driver (long story short: a SYN packet is sent and ignored by the modem, things go out of sync from there). So, yes, there was that issue but the problem was found at a time my connection was also behaving properly and we left it at that (fixed with another network card). Unfortunately the connection started to act up shortly after, which was confirmed by connecting more computers.
At least they have one good employee!
what next
I am not sure I can expect them to do anything else. They have no structure to let competent people handle the problems from begin to end.
The sad thing is that I used to work for Time Warner, back in the Atari days, on video game projects and it was a great company to be with. I am not sure how it has sunk so low nor how they can make it right now.
I guess adjusting the bill is a first step: they sell 10mbps while they can only deliver 8mbps in a perfect case, so that’s 20% stolen right there. But then, I get an average of 2.5mbps, so to be fair I should pay only 25% of my bill…
In an ideal world, I should be able to bill them for the time they wasted from me, until the service works or they officially recognize they are not able to deliver proper service.
In the meantime, I’m just passing the word…
