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I’ve now had my new cable internet from Time Warner for about two weeks. For the first few days, the service would cut out on me intermittently, as you can read about in this article. Anyway, since I posted that last rant, my service has actually improved. Here’s how it happened:

On Sunday morning, while driving in to town, I noticed a Time Warner repair van parked in front of a telephone pole at the intersection of my street and the road to town. I pulled over and asked him if he was working on the cable lines because of a problem on my street. He said that he was checking all the connections because someone had reported a problem with their cable on my street, but that he couldn’t find anything wrong at that particular pole. He asked for my address and said he’d check the outside connection on his way out.

Ever since that point I haven’t had a single problem. We’ve had a majorly nasty snow storm drop some heavy, wet slush on us, but the last 150,000 pings to the DNS server at my work have gone through, so I think I’m in the clear. I’m pleasantly surprised enough to give them credit on this one, although I suppose it could’ve been blind luck / a coincidence. I guess I’m pretty happy for the moment, and the connection’s still nice and fast. Also going for them right now….they still haven’t sent me a bill.

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Ever since my cable internet was installed exactly a week ago, the service has been intermittent at best. I’ll be happily surfing along one minute, then the next thing I know, I’ll get a timeout and have to reboot the modem. For this reason, I reluctantly began my acquaintance today with Time Warner Cable / RoadRunner customer service.

The first number I could track down on Time Warner’s labyrinthine site was for what they call the ‘National Technical Support Depot’ or something equally professional and important sounding. I called up and, to my surprise, was on the phone with a real live human within five minutes. So far, so good.

I hate it when people tell me in my tech support job that they ‘know what they’re doing’ and ‘don’t need to hear the stupid questions.’ I’ve lived with technology long enough to know that asking the ’stupid’ questions is often what gets you results, since I’ve forgotten to plug in the power / IDE / network cable a few times myself. So, when ‘Mike’ got on the phone with me, I made sure not to announce to him that I had a high opinion of my technical expertise. Instead, I described the problem as best I could, while trying to impress upon him that I had in fact tried a bunch of things, and had discovered that I could usually reset the modem and plug in the cable and then the network in that order to resume service. Mike confidently diagnosed my problem as ’something in the line or maybe the modem,’ and transferred me to ‘Dispatch.’

Dispatch, as luck would have it, was in Maine. Within 30 seconds, the new tech and I had confirmed that ‘Mike’ had no friggin’ idea what he was talking about, as he had diagnosed and reported my problem as a ‘blinking power light,’ despite my not putting any such sort of idea in his head. With a disgusted tone, the new tech announced that ‘the guys in the call center think they’re kind of hot shit,’ but that he was of the opinion that, in reality, they ‘thought they know more than they do.’

At this point, the new guy (who shall remain nameless because of his failure to give me his name), suggested I head outside and check the splitter outside the house for moisture or a poor connection. If there was no improvement, he said I could call back and they’d send a tech with a new modem to my house.

For the last few hours, to get a baseline, I’ve been running Quick Ping Monitor and logging pings to the cable modem and a nearby DNS server every five seconds. After 4 hours or so, I’ve had no drops to the modem and a 69% loss rate on the connection to the real world. I’m saving the log, and I’m not paying the bill if the service doesn’t top 90% uptime soon.

So far, I’m pretty ambivalent about this tech support. It’s friendly, but not necessarily competent. Communication seems a little sketchy, but on the flip side, the guys on the other end can definitely call up the necessary connectivity data now on their systems–neither of my techs were shy about discussing the fact that my modem was alternating between a connected and disconnected state. I’m a little pissed I have to head out with a flashlight now, but at least I don’t need to wait for a tech. We’ll see if messing with the splitter does anything…

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I got Time Warner’s RoadRunner “high speed” internet a couple of days ago. You may have seen my recent excited post about how I now have internet access. Well, sometimes. See, apparently Time Warner is pretty much what I thought a cable company would be: terrible. My modem fails to achieve something called “Upstream Ranging” on a regular basis. From an end-user perspective, this manifests itself as a complete inability to get online. Alan over at Users Suck! was quick to suggest via GoogleTalk that some internet beats my previous connection, provided courtesy of my BlackBerry and SharkModem. I found it hard to agree, since I was typing back to him on that damned tiny PDA keyboard.

A little internet research (when the connection came back, intermittently), yielded this gem of a t-shirt, apparently designed by a fellow Time Warner internet subscriber. Another search on Google for ‘Time Warner sucks’ yielded this witty blog post and instance of anti-cable cyber-graffiti. I guess I’m not alone.

So I throw this question into the aether, to be borne away on the currents of cyberspace as fate may take it, thither and yon, across hill and dale, from every end of every non-DSL service area to the other: Dammit, Time Warner. Why must you suck?

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Mobishark’s SharkModem for the BlackBerry lets you view detailed connection info in a simple format.

Up until 20 minutes ago, I had no internet access from home. How could this be, you ask? Living as I do, in a rural part of the country, however, high speed access is not ubiquitous by any means. In my case, I could get cable, but until two weeks ago, my service provider was Adelphia (soon to be bought by Time Warner Cable), and now is Time Warner Cable (staffed apparently by new and different, yet equally incompetent, call center gnomes). Neither of these moronic corporate behemoths are able to muster the energy to appear at my domicile, even to extract an exorbitant $24.95 a month for ‘mediocre-speed’ 256kbps access on top of a $49.95 ‘installation fee,’ which is where the company’s tech gets paid training in how to set up a cable modem, and I get to pay him or her for it. Dialup is the same price, and therefore a rip-off in its own right. So what’s left?

The Blackberry, dingus! Pay attention.

Now, the fine folks at Mobishark, errr, Software? have created a truly interesting piece of software, not to mention a good way to stick it to the big wireless companies for their strong-arm tactics. Here’s the breakdown of the scam your service provider’s probably trying to pull: (1) An ‘unlimited’ data plan with a provider such as, say, Verizon Wireless grants you ‘unlimited access’ to use your Blackberry handheld to surf the web, no matter how many of those little bits and bytes you steal through the mysterious magic wires in the sky that let us all be ‘IN.’ (2) Your Blackberry can be a modem. Pure and simple. After all, Verizon’s perfectly willing to sell you their NationalAccess or BroadbandAccess plans for another $30 a month, so it must work, right?

Heh, yup. Download the trial of SharkModem from Mobishark’s website, and you’ll find just how freaking easy it can be. Install it on your computer and use the app loader to put it on the Blackberry, and you’ll be up and running almost right away (albeit with a 5MB throughput limit on the demo). I was sold immediately. After all, it doesn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense to be paying for unlimited data which is being unfairly limited (SharkModem uses the device itself to make HTTP and socket requests, so it’s exactly like surfing the web on the Blackberry, only with a real screen) solely to make free money for your wireless provider. At $34.97, on ‘sale‘ right now, SharkModem is around what I would’ve paid for a month’s service through my wireless provider, and it’s a one-time fee.

The speed is not bad, although it’s nothing like Verizon’s BroadbandAccess in terms of being able to stream media or live content. Not surprisingly, the big delay is on the initial request, while (I assume) the device has to wait its turn to send the request through the tower to a computer, to the content’s host, back through the computer to the tower and back to the Blackberry. It can take up to 5 seconds before there’s a response (which you can see on SharkModem’s simple yet highly informative Connections tab), but once you’re going, download speeds on Verizon’s network average around 10KBps with 2 bars of service, or approximately 2x modem speed. And the price is right.

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