I've got to rant. Sorry.

A bit of background on me: During college, I interned by programming a control system for a relativistic heavy ion collider on Long Island. Second internship was to dev a management system for the linear particle accelerator that feeds the RHIC. Immediately after finishing my thesis and graduating, I nabbed a job at a prominent internet service provider in the area. I started in Tier 1 support, worked my way through tier 2, 3, escalations and ended up in engineering. (So I was working directly with the hardware in question below.) I've seen these failures a few times in my career, know the telltale signs, and know how to proactively treat the problem so a minimum number of subscribers are impacted. During my (albeit brief, my own choice to leave) stay at said ISP, I've managed to keep subscriber impact below 0.5% in my managed areas for any given outage. I suck at a lot of things, but when it comes to large-scale network management, I'm just frankly damn good.

Basically, I am sick of Time-Warner Cable's support. It's terrible. Tier 1 knows about as much as my left pinky when it comes to networking and how to support a system. Tier 2's about as competent as my right hand, at best. Long story short: They have a failing UBR card that I'm attached to. Me and about 35,000 other subscribers. But they're being cheap as hell and not replacing it. As such, my SNR drops to about -80dB at random for no discernible reason, and my connection dies. How do I know this? I've been logging my US, DS and SNR for the past 6 months (or since this issue started happening.) Upstream and downstream are consistently within spec. SNR drops to roughly 50dB below minimum every time I disconnect. The reason is likely because the card itself has a broken signal timing crystal or broken amplification circuit. Likely the latter, as crystals don't exactly break without physical tampering. But they won't replace it. Instead, every time the card chokes and drops 80% of its subs, they send a truckroll out to bounce the card and play a virtual shell-game with subscribers' physical connections to said card. This generally gives the card some time to cool off and resume working, but never results in a permanent fix. The fix is to replace the card, but they're too cheap. They also won't invest in infrastructure because they have a government-granted monopoly on the area, so they can get away with mountains of bull-manure.

What has me even more pissed, is the attitude tier 1 and 2 take with me. I give them the troubleshooting steps I've taken, and yet they still talk down to me like I'm some invalid.

"Have you tried turning it off and on again."
Yes, I just told you that. I've bounced the modem, router, machine, cleared cache and checked the US/DS/SNR. Everything is fine except the SNR.
"Disconnect your router and connect your computer directly to your modem and turn off your firewall."

.....Yeah, because I enjoy Alexa being all over my machine like white on rice, and about thirteen Chinese hackers sucking my tax-info folder dry. How about no and you just escalate me to Tier 3 because you have an outage on your hands? No, instead I have to sit through about an hour and a half of support script torture before they finally give me a case number and put me on hold for another half f**king hour before they finally get me to a Tier 3 agent who tells me, "Yeah, it's an outage. We'll have it up within 24 hours." and hangs up on me.

I never thought I'd say this, but: I miss Cablevision, dearly. And I cannot wait for Google Fiber to roll out in my area.

[This message has been edited by Ravant (edited 04-15-2014).]

So, What are you trying to say?

Time-Warner needs to fix their crap. I'd love to switch to another ISP, but there isn't another in my area. And with the pending Comcast-Slime-Warner merger, this crap-sandwich is about to be topped with a heaping slathering of bandwidth caps. When Google Fiber rolls out, I'm switching, and not looking back, personal-data-vacuum be damned.

[This message has been edited by Ravant (edited 04-15-2014).]

I know your pain, went through a similiar situation with time warner. Last january I was getting 5mb download and less than 1 upload (paying for 20 mb down) called support went throught the hoops, send driver out test the lines. tells me all is ok. Next week same issue, told it was due to peak times, understandable 5-9 pm, but a 1 am shouldn't be an issue, they replace my modem. Next week same thing again, so they send another tech, at 11 am, I tell him it will be fine, need to be here between 5-9 pm to see the issue. He confirms, all is ok at 11 am. Leaves all is ok. Call support at 6 that night with same issue, next day someone shows up at 6 and confirms the issue, spends the next 3 hours running new cable from pole to house, through house to modem. Test the line, guess what same issue. He tells me nothing more he can do, call support. Support puts me through to a supervisor, tells me nothing but he will look into it. Turns out the hub arounf the corner is going bad, ask when it will be fixed, I am told it is not a priorty until enough people complain. Six weeks later he calls and says it is fixed. Yes it was, january this year, same issue, call support they run there test, 1 year old modem is the wrong one, techie says when did you get that, I tell him your service tech gave it to me a year ago. His reply, that modem hasn't been used in at least 1 1/2 years.

time warner sucks

dan

I fight with them nearly monthly over something or other. I pay $150 a month. I had phone service with them too till they couldnt fix a problem their system had for 6 months. I still had phone problems with my new carrier due to TW. New carrier told me after working here for half a day that they traced the problem to TW switching center. Dozens of phone calls to them and they basicly said they...and me didnt know what we were talking about. I sent an official form to the FCC in Wash DC. After a month, FCC sent me a letter saying TW had told them the problem was corrected. Right after I got that letter, TW calls me to tell me they found a problem from when I discontinued service. The said they located the problem in the area switching center. I told her duhhhhh, thats what I told you 2 months ago when you blew me off. To get anything done apparently, you have to go over their heads. TW never mentioned in the phone call the FCC had told them 'to fix it'. Im stuck too...no other local access to switch too. Dish wont work because of 100' Oak trees. If Hulu or Netflix had all my favorite programs, Id quit cable in a minute. Neither of those carry all my racing programs either.

quote Originally posted by rogergarrison: ... Im stuck too...no other local access to switch too. Dish wont work because of 100' Oak trees. If Hulu or Netflix had all my favorite programs, Id quit cable in a minute. Neither of those carry all my racing programs either.

That's how it is everywhere. Sure, it's an open market and there's "competition" (a monopoly would be illegal).
But the big players divvy up the regions so they're a MONOPOLY in each region anyway.

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Calgary time/temp

3.4L Supercharged 87 GT Click me
Super Duty 4 Indy #163 Click me

[This message has been edited by fierosound (edited 04-16-2014).]

I did have a company for 25 years called Insight Communications that wasnt bad. Time Warner bought them out last summer. WOW isnt available, Sat wont work, and I wont use AT&T (just a bad as TW, AND you have to have a box for each of 6 tvs). So tecnically they dont have a monopoly here.

As long as you have competition in the area... IE: you have other providers that more or less will provide equal service, then you just threaten to cancel your subscription. I had COMCAST where I used to live, and hated it. It would occasionally go down, and I simply refused to do the whole... "how many halogen lamps do you have plugged in, have you reset your router, etc..." I simply said... the problem is not in here, it is out there. If it's not fixed by tomorrow night, I'm cancelling my service... plain and simple. They would start to give me some nonsense and I simply re-iterated. I was nice, and told them I know it's not their fault, but I simply don't want to deal with it.

It was fixed by the following night each time.

We used to have Time-Warner in my town. Now we have Charter Cable. No major complaints. I don't know how the providers got switched.

I hear that Comcast is one of the worst rated companies in USA.

Latest rumor here is Time Warner is being bought out by Comcast within the year.

quote Originally posted by rogergarrison: Latest rumor here is Time Warner is being bought out by Comcast within the year.

It's not a rumor. It's currently being decided in Congress if the FTC will allow it. Which adds bandwidth data caps to my already crap service.