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

Got stuck on the phone with Time-Warner Milwaukee again tonight, attempting to make some sense out of the short stack of Time-Warner bills we’ve received just prior to and since our move/transfer of service. “Laura” helped with correcting a couple of errors on the 4-pack of bills we had sitting here that made no sense.

One of the bills we received (dated May 30th, two days after our new-home install) had a due date of June 3rd. We received it…June 3rd. Really? Seems like a sure-fire way to score another $5 late fee…

We had an install charge for our new hookup at the new house we were told we wouldn’t have, both by the Southridge retail rep when we inquired about service transfer procedures and by the actual installer after he completed the installation at our new home. We also had a weird credit for three dollars and change that made no sense, from our former residence/account, as well as a late fee we pre-paid (expecting our payment would end up a day or so late) that didn’t seem to be debited or credited anywhere on any of the later bills.

I tried to do the math, and failed. And so did Laura, despite her best efforts. The bills made no sense; we could not calculate the same amount due as listed on the bill or as listed in Time-Warner’s system. I literally stared at that stack of bills off and on for over two weeks; if Excel was a living, breathing thing, I would have made it cry.

So much for those Time-Warner commercials touting “easy billing”. Why list an install charge as “Double Play Video HSD” when “Installation Fee” is much more…readable and clear? Obfuscation with hopes people will simply gloss over such items, maybe?

Anyway, Laura eventually waved her helpful hand over it all and made the appropriate corrections, for which we’re grateful. She then asked me some other questions about my time as a Time-Warner customer, which of course got me talking… After describing our recent cable-burying situation (since she asked), she took it upon herself to credit our current bill further, which we also appreciate.

I went on–since she seemed genuinely interested–telling her all about the reboot-related issues we’ve had over the last year and a half or so, and how we’ve never gotten anywhere with any of it. She attempts to find out whom I can talk to, apparently instant-messages someone, then informs me she’s been told she has to run things through her chain of command. She eventually connects me with her “Solutions Team Lead”, “Patty”, who reminded me a lot why I find it so incredibly hard to even bother talking to anyone at Time-Warner anymore.

I really should have stopped Laura as soon as she offered to get someone for me.

I attempt to explain all of this historical reboot-fiasco stuff to Patty, which is increasingly difficult for me to do anymore. She notes we were just given a $90 credit this evening…which, on its face, is true. But it isn’t at all for the reboot issue; it’s for the recent line-burying fiasco and other credits for billing errors as explained earlier.

She then tells me she might be able to offer me $5 per month for the Turbo Roadrunner add-on instead of the $9.95 per month we’re paying now, for the next 12 months.

I tell her another approximately $60 as compensation for a year and a half of paid-for-but-never-worked service, and all the BS that went along with it, isn’t really going to cut it. We’re out at least a year’s worth of Roadrunner, at Turbo pricing, that we paid for but really never received. Nevermind all the other hassles of logging reboots/sweating/calling/holding/cursing/crying, lost wages, inconveniences of nonworking Internet-related services like Tivo guide-data updates, service-pack and critical OS/security updates, online gaming, podcasts, streaming audio/video… and on and on.

During all of this, she’s apologizing, which of course we’ve gotten a lot. I think she honestly believes she’s being fair, but I don’t know that she’s really grasping the full extent of our past situation. She’s attempting to explain away things like how a cable line could spend 15 months on our old lawn, for instance, but none of it makes sense when you think about it: sure, line burials are queued and we have to wait our turn, and yes, weather can be a factor, but the line laid across our back yard through the entire spring, summer, and fall of 2007. No queue is that long.

She attempts to reassure me that everyone at Time-Warner tries to help (so very untrue in our experience), and she seemed unable to fathom that we’ve ever had no-show, no-response problems, or that we’ve ever dealt with reps or techs who chose to pass the buck back our way rather than own up to an issue and honestly try to fix it.

In the end, I tell her that even a year’s worth of free Roadrunner service at this point is insufficient. She tells me she lacks the ability to do anything about that; I’m asking for too much money, apparently. I explain I’ve not even received a proper apology from anyone that might also have the power to not just hang up the phone with me, but also pick it right back up and get the right people moving to actually fix things.

What does she finally give me? The name and phone number of her boss, “Matt”, whom I’m supposed to call myself and explain all of this all over again. That was apparently the best she could do. I can’t fathom there not being some sort of specialty department or contact person with Time-Warner’s corporate offices that deals with the “hard” customer problems. If there is, she either isn’t aware or wasn’t inclined to share.

And so, once again, Time-Warner puts the ball back in my court. I’m always left being the one doing the followup. Why?

I swear the Time-Warner system is all about wearing customers down to the point of surrender.

So I told her to pass on this website’s address to Matt, and that he should read up on the history of our reboot issues, at which point he can then contact us. We’re not chasing anyone at Time-Warner around anymore, as it’s still never gotten us anywhere.

Our expectations are low, as always. Time-Warner, surprise us.

What is–slowly–getting us somewhere, however, is Google and other search engines. Search results related to Time-Warner and Roadrunner problems are increasingly pointing back to this site, and more people are noticing.

Whatever it takes, right? How much attention to this comedy-of-errors debacle does Time-Warner Milwaukee really want? That ball is in their court.

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Time Warner does it again!

But First, The Survey And The Burial

So, sometime day before yesterday our yard was surveyed so the bright-orange cable line that’s been lying across our yard and down the hill to the street-side cable hookup for the past three weeks can finally be buried. Three weeks was long enough, and I’ve gotten tired of mowing around the thing, so we think it’s great to see a little paint on the lawn.

But wait, it’s not great. They only surveyed outside our fence. Why? Fear of a dog in our back yard (we don’t have one)? They also didn’t bother knocking or ringing our obnoxiously-loud doorbell to ask, either, because we were home all day.

So who knows what’s going to happen. We decide to wait and see, since calling anyone at Time-Warner almost always leads to more confusion and delay. And yeah, we know that it’s not Time-Warner’s fault the survey wasn’t done properly, because they’re not the ones that do the surveys. But we also have years of experience interacting with them, and calling Time-Warner to ‘fix’ something is rarely straightforward or simple…as you’ll soon read (again).

A couple of guys showed up yesterday to bury the line. Contractors for Time-Warner. They look like a father-son duo, and they’re certainly nice enough to me. I tell them the area inside our fence hasn’t been surveyed for some reason, so I don’t know what they plan to do. The ‘father’ of the crew whips out his phone, talks to someone, hangs up, then tells me he’s called in a one-hour survey and that he’ll be back in a couple of hours to get the line finally buried.

My jaw nearly dropped. I’m actually astounded that someone related to Time-Warner in any fashion can actually pick up a phone and Make Things Happen, Right Away™.

So they leave. Some time goes by. Eventually I’m back outside with our oldest son, and we notice fresh paint lines on our inside-fence lawn. Survey done. Wow, progress! A short while later, the ‘father-son’ team shows up again to finally bury the line. They knock on the door, let us know our cable-related services will be down while they disconnect the line to bury it properly. No problem, I say…go for it. So they get to it. We talk some more a bit later about watering the trench so the grass doesn’t turn brown, and hey, they seem like decent guys. I let them get back to work finishing up packing the trench, reconnecting the street-side connection, etc.

A short while later I hear them loading their trenching machine back onto its trailer. I hear their truck start, and away they go. I figured they might check back with me first about our service to make sure it was turned back on and working correctly, but they didn’t. Weird…

So I run down to my office to verify things are working. I take a look at the cable modem lights. No connection.

Uh-oh. I run back upstairs and flip on the television. No signal. Oh, crap…

Would it have been that big of a deal after talking to me several times already to just check in that one last time and make sure everything was working again? In my opinion, verifying everything is working as it should is a must-do upon completion of any service one performs.

Cue Circus Music…

Now the fun begins. I decide to call Time-Warner Customer Service’s 800 number. If you’re a regular reader here, you already know my expectations at this point are very, very low…

Oh, wait, I can’t call Time-Warner because we use Vonage, which requires a broadband connection we no longer have. We’re in-between with cellphones right now, due to our recent move, so nothing to do there. My wife has just come home, however, and has her work cellphone, so I use that to call Time-Warner…even though that phone is a strictly-work-only device as mandated by her employer. Oh well, this is an emergency…

First call to the Time-Warner 800 number gets me “Demetrius”. I explain the situation to him. I tell him that the line-burying guys just left, mere minutes ago, and if someone could simply call them, they should be able to come right back and take care of things right away, as it’s obviously just something they messed up in the street-side box. He puts me on hold for a while. I was probably on the phone with him about 10 minutes, including hold time. He eventually tells me I should be getting a call from a local dispatcher in the next 15-20 minutes. I give him my wife’s work cellphone number as the only way to reach us, which he understands and notes in our account.

I ask what I should do if they don’t call (as this has happened to us more than once before), and he tells me to call back. Of COURSE that’s how it should be… Bzzzt.

About 20 minutes later, I get a call from a woman whose name I no longer recall (update: from her voicemails after this incident was finally resolved, her name is Toni). Total time of call was about 15 minutes, including hold time. I explain what’s happened, and how I’d like her to call the contractors and get them right back out to finish their job correctly, as they clearly didn’t.

Welcome To Hell.

And here is where things go the most wrong, death-spiraling into Time-Warner-knows-better-than-you hell. Again.

Toni insists the cable reconnection isn’t the job of the cable-burying crew; she tells me that all they do is bury the lines, and if there’s an issue with my connection, she’ll have to find a regular Time-Warner line technician to come out. She refuses to believe me when I tell her that the line-burying guys DO in fact unhook the cable line so they can bury it, and what this is isn’t a general failure of my cable connection, or anything requiring a technician, but a simple case of a crew that didn’t complete their regular work correctly and should be easily fixed by them, as it IS part of their job. She puts me on hold. She eventually comes back and tells me she’s having trouble finding someone to help me and she’ll call me back in 20 minutes. I say fine, and there I sit again, no closer to resolution than before.

So for the next HOUR, I’m walking around with my wife’s work cellphone in my hand, getting nothing done, waiting for them to call back. At the one-hour mark, I call THEM back at the 800 number again, as I’m thinking I’ve waited long enough. By this time, it’s almost 4 PM, and the day is getting away from all of us. I get another completely different person this time (Rosa?). Total time of call was around 20-25 minutes, going nowhere fast. Our call was peppered with severely long hold times several times as she conferred with people. At one point, Rosa tells me that I was called back and a voicemail was left for me. Umm, no. Apparently Toni–who correctly called my wife’s cellphone number the first time–called back on our regular home line…which is the Vonage line we can’t answer with our cable/broadband connection down. Way to go, Toni.

Our going-nowhere-fast, series-of-loooong-holds call with Rosa was actually cut short by Toni via call waiting, finally and correctly calling me back on my wife’s work phone. At this point, it was an hour and 20 mins since she told me it would be 20 minutes.

Toni’s actually rather snotty about everything. Says she talked to “technicians that installed the cable line” and they’d get a crew to come back out “today”. “Today”? Seriously? She tells me she “called me already about all this” (paraphrased), but makes no mention that she called the wrong number.  Fine, “today” it is, then. I’m clearly not going to get any better answer, so I guess I’m stuck waiting, once again not knowing if/when anything will happen.

About 45 minutes later, the original line-burying duo shows up to fix the line. Turns out when they redid the street-box cable connector, the stinger wasn’t left long enough. The line wasn’t buried quite properly at the enclosure, either. I get the impression the younger guy’s in training. The ‘father’ also tells me he saw me talking to the ’son’ close to their completion of work, so he thought we’d had a conversation verifying everything was up and running OK… Oops.

And Finally…

Anyway, it’s all working again. The fix was simple, minor, and quickly and easily resolved…just as I expected and explained it would be.

It was down about five hours altogether for what should have been 15-30 mins, max. Not bad for Time-Warner, I suppose, but still ridiculously unacceptable.

And let’s be clear: we don’t have a problem with a single instance of a worker (in training or otherwise) screwing something up. These things happen. What we don’t like is the it’s-not-us, we-know-better-than-you attitude and the presumption of customer stupidity that emanates from Time-Warner’s Customer Service/Support. If they had called the line-burial guys back right away when I first called in, we likely would have been up and running again right away.

In the hour I spent doing nothing but waiting for a callback from Toni, I could have driven around our entire town and found a Time-Warner truck and technician on my own. Never mind the lost productivity (and earnings) from the downtime, which of course Time-Warner never feels is their responsibility even when the outage is their own damn fault.

It’s shocking and ironic that Time-Warner’s in the communication business, when they’re so incredibly poor at it.

All we’ve ever wanted is what we’re paying for to work. When it doesn’t work, we want competent and responsive service. Time-Warner proves time after time that these most-basic customer expectations are almost entirely unreasonable.

Prologue

We got a voicemail (during all the aforementioned downtime, go figure) from a Sam Olmsted (sic?), a manager with Time-Warner Business Class Services regarding this very blog. Someone with Time-Warner–somewhere–finally notices. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that it’s probably a sales call instead of real assistance. I half-expect to hear something like “With Biz Class service, you can get real QoS and guaranteed uptime!” I suppose I should call him anyway and see what he wants. Anything’s possible, right?

It’s now been TWO MONTHS since we not only voiced our concerns at the local Time-Warner office, but requested someone contact us about this issue.

They certainly know where we live. They know our phone number. They’ve been given a business card with additional contact information, a link to this very website, and to the Twitter account we’ve used to log disconnects and mini-blog about the situation.

And still, nothing. Not a peep.

The last time we paid our bill in person at the Southridge retail location, I asked the rep if she remembered me. She said she did. I told her that we still had no been contacted by anyone. She seemed surprised. She told me she would make sure someone knew so that it would be taken care of.

That was more than a month ago now…and still not a word from anyone.

Is it really this hard to do even the most basic customer service correctly, Time-Warner? Is taking responsibility too hard for you, Time-Warner? Apparently it is. It’s disgusting and pathetic.

So with that in mind, we are left with no choice but to start escalating this outside Time-Warner’s realm, if only for principle’s sake, because it’s unbelievably sad that such a major presence in Milwaukee can so openly and shoddily treat customers. How overwhelmed are you with the constant Time-Warner and Roadrunner branding around town, at sports events, on television, etc? You can’t escape it. They brag about their products, and they brag about their service. To us, their customer service claims of excellence seem like proposterous, impossible, bold-faced lies.

It’s time someone called them on it all. Openly. For all to see. Time-Warner, if you’ve got time and money to sponsor Summerfest, you’ve probably got a few resources to personally contact us and Finally Do The Right Thing(tm) and make this entire nightmare of the last year right, once and for all.

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.

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.