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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.

cable internet, cable modem, customer service, dns, oh my god I’m so sick of winter it’s not even funny, roadrunner, snow, snow storm, tech support, technical support, time warner, time warner sucks

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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