a l e x f a l k e n b e r g

It’s still too early to say with any kind of certainty, but according to the folks at the Southridge Time-Warner retail store location, it might be.

We just don’t want to see any more of this:

820 lost packets, 57% packet loss. In an hour. Booyah!

So I went into the retail location tonight, nervous about blowing up at people there, because, as I’ve explained before, a person can only endure so much and calmly explain a complex problem so many times with sufficient detail to make the true horror of the situation clear before that person simply…can’t anymore.

All in all, I think I handled myself a lot better than I imagined I would….so that’s good. Am I totally pleased with the outcome? Not really. I’ll explain.

First, I want to thank the people there at the Southridge store–Selenthia and Julia in particular, as they were the ones that worked with me and discussed the situation with me. So thank you to the two of you specifically and to the rest of the staff–including the New Guy I probably scared a little initially, sorry!

So I guess we still have some issues, as I mentioned…

I launched into explaining my issue and was quickly told that they had received a memo about the Turbo service (which we’ve had continuously in its various forms since December 2006) not being compatible with Motorola Surfboard cable modems SB4100 and SB4200.

Take a guess what models we’ve had most of the last year and a half. Yep, SB4100/4200s.

We had an SB4200 when this whole situation blew up in December 2006 (boy, doesn’t that date sound familiar…) for the first time, and we swapped it out–numerous times–and ended up with an SB4100 each time after that. I don’t recall ever getting another SB4200 in exchange, and I know we never got anything newer than that.

The problem is that they got this memo, according to Selenthia, about a month and a half ago.

How hard would it be, really, to notify SB4100/4200 users on Turbo? I was told “they should have notified you”, but I have no idea how or when that might have happened. I don’t recall it showing up on any statements, but we’ll be double-checking that.

Now, we’ve been saying since the very beginning that it seemed awfully coincidental that all of these problems started shortly after switching/upgrading to the “Turbo” service in December 2006. We have mentioned this to every person we’ve ever talked to about this problem as a possible reason for the issue. We were blown off by everyone.

And here we are, almost a year and a half later, and we were right all along. But no one from Time-Warner / Roadrunner could be bothered to even seriously consider it.

Julia, apparently one of the store managers, worked with me to credit our bill for the recent troubles, but as nice and as helpful as she was, as far as the total effort put forth by Time-Warner Milwaukee / Roadrunner The Giant Faceless Company is concerned, it’s just not enough. We put up with most last year being told the problem was ours. That the problem was our house, our computers, televisions, Tivos, our neighbors, and on and on. No one ever accepted or investigated the possibility that the problem was on the TW side of the pole. Ever.

We were blown off by almost every single TW/RR person we ever communicated with.

So we wasted–completely, totally wasted–entire man-weeks of time reconfiguring our network, moving wiring, moving machines, changing out hardware, driving back and forth swapping out modems, sitting in call queues getting the runaround, putting up with incompetent technicians, gutting and changing every device configuration and setup we have…logging and tracking reboots for hours and hours and days and days, totally frustrated.

Unable to do anything online. No work. No fun. Nothing.

All the things Time-Warner techs and engineers should have been doing, as the problem became increasingly, obviously Not In Our House Anywhere…we were essentially forced to do ourselves. No one else was going to do it!

Much of this effort and frustration is reflected in posts presented here on this site. It has been PAINFUL, exhausting, frustrating, and created so much anger. It has cost us so much in so many ways.

Julia told me she would be passing my business card–which has this website’s address on it–on to her superiors. We hope someone in the higher echelons of Time-Warner Milwaukee / Roadrunner takes the time to come here, reads about all we’ve endured, and does The Right Thing. We want a solid, public apology from someone In Charge. Not some slick handshake from a sales or marketing drone, not some PR person or anyone else programmed to lie and tell people what they want to hear. No form letters.

We want a sincere, honest gesture made to us for all of the crap and pain and tears and work we’ve endured, all the business and social losses. All the work Time-Warner should have been doing all along. All the effort that was never made to help us. For nearly a year and a half, all told.

It’s the very least they can do. More would be even better.

What else can Time-Warner / Roadrunner do? Start monitoring comments online, for starters. Even basic searches will quickly lead you back to this very website. Comcast is monitoring online communications and social networks like Twitter. Time Warner / Roadrunner is, ironically, apparently really bad at being online citizens and monitoring that space for opportunities to improve.

They could really be connecting with their customers more quickly and more positively, and word-of-mouth effects from such encounters would dramatically improve the perception of their interest and their brand, increase customer loyalty, and drive new business.

But even before that, listen to your customers. However they come to you. Take them seriously. Do not tell them the problem is theirs if there’s any chance it is not. Give them some benefit of the doubt. Follow up on promises, too. If you say you’re going to call back, call back. This is incredibly basic, fundamental stuff! Don’t let yourselves get so big or caught up thinking you’re so big that even one customer doesn’t matter. Word of mouth–especially now with the Internet–is incredibly powerful. Use it to your advantage!

So back to the solution…

We’re told the fix is a newer-model cable modem. Go figure. So we were given a Motorola SB5100 that’s supposed to work and correct everything.

It’s hooked up. At a glance, speeds seem better. No reboots so far…

That said, we’ll definitely continue to track our connection and log all details until we’re satisfied this actually fixes the problem. We’ll be running speed tests, doing download tests, and verifying stability, reliability, and speed.

We’ll definitely be raising more hell if this still isn’t resolved; there are plenty of places yet to shout and get people looking more closely at this.

And in the meantime, Time-Warner Corporate, we await your review of the entirety of our long-running nightmare and an appropriate return gesture by you for all the hell you put us through. And when you’re done with us, look around a little, refocus, and start helping all the others out there that need you, too.

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The idea with this post is to (hopefully) illustrate a bit more graphically what a typical hour or so of Roadrunner broadband service is like for us right now, pretty much every time we try to really use it. Maybe it will help people understand our frustration–possibly even someone with some authority/power to Get Things Done at Time-Warner and/or Roadrunner, who knows.

A few nights ago now (April 9th), as a test, we started a bittorrent download, using Deluge under Ubuntu Linux, and proceeded to watch our connection choke, over and over again. It wasn’t at all unexpected; this is how it was for us most of last year, and how it’s been–and continues to be–still today, since early February this year when it started happening all over again, anytime we try to actually use our Roadrunner service.

The download was started around 8pm. Almost immediately, our connection started acting up, and the cable modem started rebooting.

It really is like clockwork. We can reproduce this EVERY TIME.

It’s worth mentioning again that this is NOT limited to bittorrent downloads. It’s any sustained network activity, but most specifically activity involving sustained downloading. Uploading seems to be less involved, though that’s not always true. And of course our cable modem reboots on its own even with no one around, but that could be due to any of the network-enabled equipment in our house downloading updates, Tivo guide data, or other information…or it could just be happening on its own, completely untriggered by anything on our end.

It’s also not limited by OS or any other factors inside our home. It is not our router or cablemodem. This has been tested repeatedly, with consistent results every time.

The following is a ping latency graph (pinging Time-Warner Milwaukee’s own broadband speed test site, http://speedtest.wi.rr.com) using PingPlotter Pro showing when our internet connection was dying, over and over again, during this one download. Red, of course, is bad:

As you can see in the graph above, the approximately 700-megabyte download took around an hour and fifteen minutes to complete. At 500K/sec down–which is only about one-third the advertised speed of our “turbo” connection–this download should have taken 20 minutes or so, at MOST. It was a very well-seeded file, to boot, so 1MB/sec down was definitely attainable on a working connection, meaning less than 10 minutes to download in that case.

At the full advertised 15Mbps speeds we’re paying (extra!) for, we should have had the file in about 5 minutes. FIVE.

Instead, it took 75 minutes. An hour and fifteen minutes. Our Roadrunner connection was more down than up during the 75 minutes this download took to complete. Our connection was also completely unusable for anything else during this time, of course, because it’s constantly disconnecting.

We’re paying for 15Mbps service, and in this case we were lucky to pull around 1.3Mbps, average. We’re only getting around 8-9 percent of the advertised download speeds we’re paying (extra, again) to get.

The resolution of the graph doesn’t allow you to see ALL of the disconnects/reboots, either. Some are unfortunately run together because the graph is rather tightly rendered (it was set to display a 3-hour timeframe) and the reboots were occurring very frequently, often 5-30 seconds after a reconnect.

The long red blob in the graph above is that time period where the router didn’t gracefully recover and reconnect and had to be manually fixed. Around 806pm, our router (Linksys WRT54G v2 running dd-wrt firmware) was unable to recover from the disconnects, forcing us to log into the router and issue a DHCP Renew to tickle the router into connecting properly again. That happened around 826pm.

DHCP Renew, Our New Best Friend...

Correcting this problem would be impossible to do (securely) if someone wasn’t on site to handle it, in which case the connection would be down indefinitely, awaiting manual assistance.

Sadly, this situation happens quite frequently. It might also seem easy to blame the router here, but our connection shouldn’t be dying over and over again, either. Most of the time, the router does in fact recover on its own.

So, what this means is, had we reconnected the router right away after the ~806pm reboot/disconnect, there would be lots more reboots/disconnects! The end result–a completely useless Internet connection–remains constant, of course; practically speaking, that’s all that really matters.

All this performance and speed, for only $55 a month, folks!
(excluding taxes and fees)

Around 830pm, after we renewed the router and got our Internet connection going again, we decided to start capturing some screenshots of the reboots as displayed by the Deluge bittorrent client. We didn’t catch all of them, but we did catch some. Note that many are very short reconnects followed very quickly by immediate disconnects. Also, as explained in an earlier blog posting, despite the tapered appearances on the downside of each graph, the disconnects from cable modem reboots are in fact immediate.

If you’re comparing the PingPlotter Pro graph with the timestamps of the following images, you may notice they’re by off a couple of minutes. PingPlotter Pro was actually running on a different machine than Deluge, and there is a clock/time difference of a couple of minutes between the machines. Here are the images, accompanied by the times the images were captured:

2008-04-09 20:30:

2008-04-09 20:31:

2008-04-09 20:33:

2008-04-09 20:37:

2008-04-09 20:38:

There were several more we had planned to post images for, but in the interests of completing this post, we’re going to skip them. We can provide them to anyone that wants them.

Here are the approximate date/time stamps for the remaining 20 minutes or so of reboots/disconnects:

• 2008-04-09 20:39
• 2008-04-09 20:40
• 2008-04-09 20:43
• 2008-04-09 20:44
• 2008-04-09 20:47
• 2008-04-09 20:49
• 2008-04-09 20:51
• 2008-04-09 20:52
• 2008-04-09 20:54
• 2008-04-09 20:56
• 2008-04-09 20:57
• 2008-04-09 20:59
• 2008-04-09 21:02

Connect, ramp up in speed a bit, then die. Connect, ramp up a bit, die. Rinse, repeat.

Simple browsing will often not trigger anything. Speedtests usually reflect slower download speeds, but are often such short tests that you don’t notice the connection crapping out. We suspect most people doing simple browsing would never even notice they had this problem, and it makes us wonder if others around us or on our node have similar issues and are similarly being ripped off without even realizing it.

Sooo…. that’s basically what happens every single time we try to do anything online. We are frustrated every time we go online to do anything. We don’t use our connection very much as a result, expecting to be tossed offline anytime we need it. It’s unreasonable, though, to wait over an hour for a 10-minute download, or to expect every Vonage call you make or receive will end up in a disconnect, for example. But here we are.

We’d love an answer, Time-Warner. We really would.

I’ve frequently said it’s about 100 feet of cable, but if you include the old cable, which was lying open and unburied across the back ditch to the pole for about 30-40 feet since we moved here almost three years ago, it’s closer to 150 feet or so.

Anyway, it’s ridiculous.

We keep changing our minds a bit about what we want and need to say to accompany the images and connectivity data we’ve been collecting and working on sharing. The problem is the following:

We’ve got a LOT of data–too much, almost–collected over the last month or so, all of it graphically viewable/displayable thanks to the magic that is PingPlotter Pro.

We’ve literally been tracking and sampling data on our connection non-stop for the last month, and we will continue to do so until this is resolved.

Some days there isn’t much to look at, because we’re probably out of town or otherwise not around or actively using the connection. Other times, like with any sustained download of any kind–regardless of OS, download protocol, machine, local network devices or configuration–it’s pure hell, riddled with cable modem reboots, Internet disconnects and packet-loss statistics that just aren’t acceptable, ever.

We hope to have a post up soon–with lots of pretty pictures for Time-Warner Milwaukee / Roadrunner–that shows pretty clearly what a giant suckfest this has been and continues to be. It would be great to be able to post everything, but it’s just not practical.

We’re quite willing to turn it all over to Time-Warner if they ever end up noticing and wanting it. We’re also quite willing to turn it over to the local media at this point, too. Enough is enough at some point, and we’re pretty sure we’re actually well beyond it.

And in other ‘more of the same’ news, the approximately 100 feet of cable line lying, unburied, across our backyard on our lawn continues to lie there, since January…of 2007, making this Month Fifteen of that, too. Oh, and it didn’t fix a damn thing, either. For that matter, Time-Warner Milwaukee has no record the guy ever paid us a visit that day or did anything, and he was here for hours.

It’s seriously like we don’t exist to anyone but the billing department.

We’re going in tonight to discuss our bill with the local Time-Warner Milwaukee office. We’re not expecting much but more Missing Of The Point accompanied by additional Lack of Understanding of the Problem.

So last night we brought in the mail, and lo, a letter from Time-Warner Milwaukee. Not just any letter, though, of course… it’s a past-due notice. Grrrrreat!

We didn’t pay last month’s bill. What are we paying for? Broken Internet service? No way. So about a week after that bill was due, an automated, computerized phonebot called here and left a robotic message telling us to call them back about our account.

If a human being can’t be bothered to call us (a loooong-running theme with Time-Warner), then screw it.

And remember, too, Time-Warner, that you still owe us about a year’s worth of refund for non-working Internet service at this point (and still counting).

So another bill is due now as of a few days ago (around April 4th, iirc), so that’s two payments now that are ‘late’. But hey, for Time-Warner, it’s not an opportunity to call us and see what’s up–like reasonable humans would–but instead blindly slap another $5 late fee on our account and threaten to “interrupt our service” with disconnection if we don’t hand over their unearned and undeserved money.

And interrupt our service? That’s a joke, right? They do this already–often dozens of times an hour!

So yeah, we probably owe them for the cable-TV-service portion of our bill, at the very least… but at the same time, as mentioned, they still owe us for last year when we had this problem before and no one ever actually fixed it. Net money due: us, not them.

It’s unbelievably ironic, isn’t it?

So now we get to drive over to their local office and try to wrap the customer-service person’s head around this entire saga, ideally without blowing up in any of their faces since it’s not the fault of any specific CS rep, but the entire generalized Time-Warner System itself. And without confusing the crap out of them, too, because we’ve been through this now for so long that it makes sense to us, but it’s so involved and hard to explain everything that’s already been done and tried…that they might not get it.

We already predict lots of apologies, maybe an offering of a month’s Roadrunner credit for our “inconvenience”, but probably not much more (see the “they might not get it” mention just above).

They’ll then want to schedule someone to come out to our house, forcing us to be available for a four-hour window of utter uselessness, only to have some slacker tech come out, hit speedtest.wi.rr.com and tell us everything “looks good” and that it has to be bad house wiring, our Tivos, or Vonage is screwing things up (”You should really sign up for Time-Warner’s Digital Phone!”).

They may also end up blaming sunspots or ghosts or whatever. Anything to avoid work.

We’ve been there and done that, a lot already. None of these tech visits have ever solved ANYTHING, all were HUGE WASTES OF TIME.

They have done one thing, though; they’ve helped confirm that the problem, whatever it is, isn’t anywhere on this side of the pole behind our house.

We just want the service fixed, and for someone to apologize and credit us accordingly at this point. This is really only about the principle of the thing; customer service and getting answers shouldn’t be this hard. Companies should not be so oblivious and/or indifferent about their customers’ experiences, wants, wishes, and concerns.

Time-Warner enjoys a major monopolistic advantage in most of its service areas, serving so many customers that maybe it just doesn’t matter to them if they can’t please everyone all the time, and that, hey, if they lose one customer this week, they’ll get another one a day or a week later. We think it’s an entirely unacceptable way of thinking about service and treating one’s customers.

Their own past-due letter threatening disconnection is a great example of their indifference, in fact. Ignoring our service issues for a second, at no point has any human being called us to ask us about payment, if we were having trouble, etc. Slapping another fine on us, threatening us with disconnection, loss of our phone number (if we happened to be Time-Warner Digital Phone customers, which we’re thankfully not), and reconnection fees if we want to enjoy their service in the future… all comes at the consumer from an entirely wrong direction.

The mentality seems to be: “Pay up now or we’ll cut you off, because we don’t really need you as a customer, we don’t actually want you as a customer, and we’re certainly not interested in managing and maintaining any relationship other than taking your money, doing as little for you and giving as little to you as possible, and making it as difficult as possible for you to get and keep the level of service you should be getting when there’s any sort of real problem.”

Time-Warner Milwaukee is constantly running ads bragging about having won numerous awards for excellent customer service. Based on our experiences the last year and a half, it’s completely unclear how they’d even rate consideration, let alone any actual award(s). The wait times on calls are terrible. CS reps are often very apologetic and friendly but otherwise clueless and therefore useless. Next-tier support isn’t much better, promising monitoring and callbacks and never delivering on those promises. On-site technicians aren’t any better, either.

Someone has to be in charge of all of this mess, but who?

A year and a half later, we still have no idea.

And in Time-Warner World, that, too, is apparently the customer’s fault.

This post is a list of recent Time-Warner/Roadrunner-related search terms from just the last 10 days or so that people are plugging into Google or Yahoo (or other) search engines, bringing them to this website, to read all about our ongoing, still-entirely-unresolved Time-Warner/Roadrunner problem.

But remember, according to Time-Warner, it’s just US. Uh-huh.

09 Apr: reboot my roadrunner modem so often
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09 Apr: can time warner roadrunner internet monitor users
08 Apr: roadrunner lost packets
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05 Apr: time warner cable modem re-boot problem
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04 Apr: Cable modem spontaneously rebooting
04 Apr: “roadrunner” “time warner” “bittorrent”
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03 Apr: Roadrunner randomly disconnects
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02 Apr: why can’t i receive emails using roadrunner/time warner
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31 Mar: roadrunner milwaukee problems
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30 Mar: has anyone with roadrunner service having problems email or web links?
30 Mar: has anyone with roadrunner service having problems email or web links?
30 Mar: road runner milwaukee disconnects renew
30 Mar: roadrunner messing up router
30 Mar: time warner reboot

Time-Warner Milwaukee/Roadrunner, when are you going to start listening to your customers, and give them the service they’re paying for?

It’s been almost a month since I last posted about this. Too ticked off, generally.

No change. No response. Nothing.

It’s being suggested over at TechCrunch that Twitter is some sort of magic bullet for solving issues not terribly dissimilar from my own here with Time-Warner Milwaukee. I’m not sure I buy it. I’ve been posting on Twitter a little about it, and I’ve been keeping a separate log of sorts on Twitter as well, and it’s had zero effect on our getting any sort of resolution from TWC-Milwaukee or Roadrunner.

Maybe Twitter is one way to stay on top of customers. Comcast is apparently better at this than TWC/RR, although I don’t know if it’s an officially sanctioned, company-created/endorsed program or a Comcast employee that just happened across an A-lister with a substantial online voice and decided to lend a hand for whatever reason.

In any case, be it Time-Warner or Twitter, neither has done much at all for me in my own situation.

Of course, I probably shouldn’t expect Time-Warner or Roadrunner to track issues on Twitter or anywhere else if they can’t even respond to direct contact from customers…

Welcome to any TechCrunch readers, btw. I’m told a friend of mine has commented on the Comcast thread there… Feel free to help me yell; I don’t have quite the publicity-generating range of the top bloggers and A-listers who get CEOs bending over backwards for them every time they so much as sneeze.

I’ve been informed of a discussion on DSLReports.com about Time-Warner Milwaukee/Roadrunner allegedly throttling users and flagging connections as abusive. The gist is that there may be limits in place that people are exceeding, so Time-Warner Milwaukee/Roadrunner, instead of informing the customer they’ve hit a limit, may be actively disrupting their connections to discourage their “heavy” usage.

Here is the response I posted to the DSLReports forum:

I’d really appreciate it if any Milwaukee-area TW/RR users (or any other TW/RR users elsewhere, if you’re having the same problems) would read about my issues with them here, in a lot greater detail:

»alexfalkenberg.com

and drop a comment; I’d like to collect as many data points as I can.

I’m tired of the BS of my cable modem constantly rebooting. I’ve been paying for their “premium” service for a long time, and getting no real use out of it. I snag a couple of TV shows here and there via BT, but that’s really it. Linux ISOs here and there, too, and some audio/video streaming, some remote-desktop stuff, and moving pictures around online. Nothing I’d personally call excessive; the connection’s supposed to be used, isn’t it?

Happens with wget/http. Happens with bittorrent. Happens with ftp/scp. Consistently, any sustained download trips my stuff up so badly that I’m forced to reset -everything-. Multiple times an hour. Sometimes _dozens_ of times an hour (sometimes every 1-2 minutes).

If all I’m doing is uploading, that often seems fine, but I still get random disconnects when there’s nothing in particular going on.

I can’t rely on my Vonage line to make/take phone calls. I can’t reliably get downloadable Tivo content or guide data. I can’t count on getting Windows updates, Linux updates, OSX updates… I can’t do any remote-support work. Can’t listen to podcasts or watch vidcasts. I’m sometimes be forced to relogin to ssh sessions dozens of times in a day. Online gaming? Forget about it!

You name it, connection-wise, and it usually sucks.

It’s been going on a long time. Everyone I’ve talked to (including 2nd and 3rd tier) denies there’s any flagging or throttling, and they’ve really gone out of their way in the past to blame everything but themselves for the problems…if/when I can get anyone at Time-Warner Milwaukee to reply at all in the first place. (I can’t.)

I have gotten tired of explaining the problem over and over and over again to first-level CS people. Techs to the house…are a joke. I’ve done plenty of pointless tests, logging, cablemodem swaps, spent time on the phone, written letters, and…. nothing. I’ve had a bright orange cable line across my lawn for more than a YEAR now when they spent hours here replacing everything all the way out to the pole (with no improvement).

The problem seemed to start in Dec 2006 (yes, 2006) when we got voluntarily bumped up to 8MBps “Turbo” service for an extra five bucks/month.

The problem seemed to go away last year finally around the time we got bumped up to 15MBps speeds.

The problem seems to have returned about 3-4 weeks ago now, and I’ve not identified any causes/changes. I know we’re also lucky to see 10MBps down for a few minutes at a time, if that, when the connection IS working and the cable modem’s not constantly rebooting.

Bottom line: the problem is not in my house, period.

If they’re messing with my connection, or if I’m somehow abusing their mysterious (and apparently ridiculous) limits, then just TELL me. I’m an adult. Give me the chance to drop the service and end a relationship they’ve apparently ALREADY decided isn’t working out for THEM, instead of, well, plainly and deliberately _stealing_ from me, taking money for service I’m paying for and not getting.

Messing with my connection is effectively ending our business relationship. And then continuing to pocket my money is somehow OK? No!

They’ve cost me a TON of money in wasted time alone…and it’s gotta stop.

Thanks for reading along and any assistance.

The real bottom line on this issue, for me, is this: I’m paying Time-Warner Milwaukee for a service (the “premium” version at that). I expect the provider to take my money and, in good faith, provide that service.

Service terms and conditions should be transparent. If a customer is violating some term or condition of that service, inform them so they can decide if another option is better. But don’t lie to them, and don’t steal from them.

Constantly disrupting a connection to modify a customer’s behavior is disturbing and disgusting. Treat your customers like adults, and let them opt out of a service and business relationship you’ve already effectively opted them out of on your end! Except for the taking-their-money-anyway part of the relationship, of course…

I’m not really your customer anymore at that point. I’m your hostage.

That’s it. Reputable businesses should not operate this way. Also, even if this isn’t technically illegal on Time-Warner’s part (I don’t know; I’m not a lawyer), it’s certainly still hugely unethical and deceptive, in my opinion. Time-Warner is making a fortune on their service offerings, by any reasonable accounting. Are they doing so by overcharging the bulk of their customers for their very minor use of the service, and severely interfering with anyone else that actually tries to use the service they’re sold? I think the answer to that is increasingly, obviously, yes.

Please share your stories and spread the word. This must stop.