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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Anyway, it’s ridiculous.

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.

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.

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

09 Apr: reboot my roadrunner modem so often
09 Apr: time warner milwaukee firmware
09 Apr: can time warner roadrunner internet monitor users
08 Apr: roadrunner lost packets
08 Apr: pictures “roadrunner”
08 Apr: uverse vs roadrunner milwaukee
08 Apr: linksys time warner cable unstable
08 Apr: linksys time warner cable unstable
08 Apr: road runner internet problems april 7th 2008
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07 Apr: time warner milwaukee sucks
07 Apr: reboot modem with ssh
06 Apr: roadrunner milwaukee bandwidth throttling
06 Apr: roadrunner slow connection milwaukee
06 Apr: roadrunner disconnects me once a day
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05 Apr: time warner milwaukee road runner prices
05 Apr: time warner cable modem re-boot problem
05 Apr: time warner cable modem re-boot problem
05 Apr: time warner cable modem problems
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05 Apr: time warner los angeles connection drop
04 Apr: Cable modem spontaneously rebooting
04 Apr: “roadrunner” “time warner” “bittorrent”
04 Apr: time warner roadrunner vista wireless problem issue
04 Apr: computers internet blog
04 Apr: computers internet blog
04 Apr: roadrunner modem problems
03 Apr: Roadrunner randomly disconnects
03 Apr: Roadrunner randomly disconnects
03 Apr: road runner disconnecting once a day
03 Apr: cable modem random reboot
03 Apr: roadrunner ssh connection slow
02 Apr: scp very slow roadrunner
02 Apr: why can’t i receive emails using roadrunner/time warner
02 Apr: roadrunner problem with IE7
01 Apr: time warner rebooting
01 Apr: roadrunner tracking
01 Apr: how to tell if road runner turbo is working
01 Apr: time warner cable milwaukee internet problems
31 Mar: roadrunner milwaukee problems
31 Mar: roadrunner tracking
31 Mar: roadrunner tracking
30 Mar: sftp road runner
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?

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.

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.

The bittorrent software takes some time to tidy up packets from the various download sources, making the dropoffs to zero-speed look gradual, when they’re really not gradual at all. So don’t think they’re gentle disconnects, because they’re not.

The first graph below depicts a typical cable modem (CM) drop/reboot and dead connection with some dead connection time (30 seconds or so), followed by a completed reboot with a live connection that lasted all of about 20 seconds before it dropped/rebooted again.

During a heavy downloading session, this can happen dozens of times an hour.

More examples of CM reboots follow below.

I’ll add that while I’m paying for "premium" 15Mbps down/1Mbps up service I’ve not noticed better than 10Mbps down since this started. And even when I get that kind of speed, it’s never for very long before everything reboots. When I’m downloading something larger, several reboots in succession confuse my router (two different routers, in fact: a Linksys WRT54G (running either stock Linksys firmware or alternative DD-WRT firmware, take your pick) and an older Netgear wired router). This usually ends in a router WAN IP renew needing done, or a router reboot, or a complete router reset (losing all settings).

This situation actually FUBAR’ed my Linksys router last year, but I was able to bring it back from the dead several months later doing a number of warranty-voiding things to it not for the faint of heart; most people would have tossed that $80 router in the trash and bought a new one, even though the router’s malfunction wasn’t their fault, at all.

Is this kind of constantly-unstable connection worth $50-60 bucks a month to you?

I really just want is the problem fixed. However, it would certainly be nice and proper to receive some remuneration from Time-Warner Milwaukee/Roadrunner for all the lost time and hassle, too, both for the current ongoing situation, as well as this same thing when it happened last year and went on for most of a year’s time. Given the lack of response when this happened last year, I suspect nothing will be done again this year.

How many other Milwaukee-area customers, or Roadrunner customers in general out there, have this problem?

It seems entirely possible it’s not your fault.

The spontaneously-rebooting cable modem problem actually started in December of 2006, but we didn’t start documenting it here until March 2007, as it was becoming more and more of an issue for us with family and customers alike.

The other reason we didn’t start reporting on the problem right away is we were attempting to work with Time-Warner to solve it, jumping through all of their standard support hoops like good little monk…err, customers, swapping out cablemodems, letting them send techs out, etc.

What a colossal waste of time, money, and effort all of that turned out to be.

• time-warner-roadrunner-problems-still
• time-warner-roadrunner-update-april-2007
• time-warner-roadrunner-update-may-2007
• open-letter-to-time-warner-milwaukee-roadrunner
• cable-modem-reboots-log (2007)

We documented the issue as best we could at the time. It was way often too much to cover, and too frustrating to keep explaining and writing, and rewriting, trying to remember every detail, over and over again.

We probably should have posted again last year when it finally cleared up, but it never really did in a clear-cut, obvious way, so it was hard to say it was actually “fixed” at the time. Rebooting problems tapered off, but we still had speed issues after that… And of course we just wanted to not have to think about it anymore.

It eventually seemed to clear up altogether, but in such a gradual way that we consider it more coincidentally than deliberately repaired. We’re fairly certain they still have no idea what caused it then, and therefore still won’t have a clue about solving it properly now.

Déjà vu of this sort really stinks…to put it mildly.

We still don’t know who the ‘they’ might be, either; we were never successful in reaching anyone with sufficient power or expertise to look into or troubleshoot the issue.

Customer-service reps and technicians would often promise to call us back, and then never did. One tech was going to put our cable modem in debug mode, monitor it for a while (a week?) and call us back either way. Never did get that call, either. One tech visit to the house apparently doesn’t exist in Time-Warner’s records, either (the visit when the cable from house to pole was entirely replaced; the guy was here for several hours). He didn’t have me sign anything or give me any paperwork, so I have no real record of it, except for the 100 feet of thick, bright-orange cable line still laying on top of our back yard since January of 2007. Yeah, they never came back to take care of that, either. 14+ months isn’t too long to wait, is it? (Yes, it’s winter now, and the ground’s too hard until spring, but still.)

From our perspective, the random cable modem reboot problems all seemed to start shortly after the speed upgrade (to “Turbo”, from 5Mbps to 8Mbps) we agreed to in mid/late-December of 2006. The rebooting problem seemed to go away round the time they flipped the switch for us on another upgrade from 8Mbps to 15Mbps service in the fall of 2007. Speed issues remained, but those eventually evened out to an acceptable level.

Switching to “premium” service is what seems to have started this mess. And in fact, we’ve been paying extra for premium service this entire time.

Oh, the irony.

Can’t ssh/telnet, can’t do any audio or video streaming. Can’t do downloads, OS updates, Tivo updates, online gaming, no remote-desktop sessions… No file transfers or data backups. And our Vonage phone service? Dropped calls.

We’re being a lot more open about the issue this time than last year when this very same thing happened, because Time-Warner/Roadrunner never actually fixed anything…

In fact, they never contacted us at all.

We had a lot of days of 100+ random cable modem disconnects last year. The random-rebooting problem kind of “went away” when they upgraded their package speeds. We put up with it last year for most of the year, initially with constant disconnects, and then with severely reduced speeds.

We never got a solution or any real help with the problem last year, and it went on for most of the year, with us paying full price the entire time (with a couple of minor loss-of-service credits along the way that ultimately didn’t matter).

You’ll notice 10 most recent Twitter entries in the right sidebar for the TW/RR tracker account. And you’re certainly more than welcome to directly follow either the TW/RR tracker, or Alex, or both, on Twitter itself:

• @TWCMKECblMdmLog
• @alexfalk

We’ll probably be opening up posts from last year’s incident that have been locked down… We’ll post again if/when that happens. Mostly a direct letter to TW/RR and some logs from the modem back then, with accompanying commentary. Boring, maybe, but also possibly insightful.

We want to be clear that all we’re after is the properly working service we’re paying Time-Warner/Roadrunner for. Hopefully they can figure out a way to make that happen, soon.

Additional site and content updates are in the works.

This post is also a quickie test of the blogging client Drivel…which really isn’t impressing me so far. More about using it under Ubuntu here. It doesn’t support Wordpress directly, and in virtually NO way does it even begin to compare to Windows Live Writer, which is arguably the current gold-standard of offsite blogging editors/clients.

From everyone here, we hope you had a great year in 2007,
and we wish you all the best in 2008!

If you use Microsoft Update, you should see it your list if updates soon if you haven’t already.

You’ll also find links there for MS Visio 2007 Service Pack 1 and MS Project 2007 Service Pack 1, if you’ve not done those already.

Details on what SP1 addresses and fixes, and any other related issues, are here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936982

They’re either completely stupid, or they’re trying to game me somehow, I don’t know. And I don’t care.

I’ll be taking my business elsewhere, right away. There are plenty of providers out there, and it’s not a problem for me to find a new one. Some are even eager to help their customers!

Maybe they’re hoping they’ll get me to call in so they can hit me up with some “must-have, can’t miss!” offers. Seems more likely at this point that they’re actually just really, really dumb. How hard IS it, Citibank, to plug my current balance(s), however you calculate them, into my soon-to-be new terms, and come up with an estimated payment amount?

Anyway, forget it, Citibank. And, umm, shove it. No one should have to ask ANY company a half-dozen times or more to answer what should be a very simple question.

Worst. Customer. Service. Ever.

All I want is for them to give me a ballpark figure on my new payment amount. A simple number. I’ve been repeatedly outright ignored and given one math puzzle so far. Our exchanges via their website have been going on since Nov. 24th.

This time Citibank replies with:

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

We appreciate your feedback. Our goal is to provide you and all our customers with the highest standard of service in the industry.

To better assist you regarding the minimum due amount on your account, please contact us at 1-800-950-5114. We are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Outside the U.S., call collect at 605-335-2222.

My reply:

Citibank, I WILL NOT CALL YOU for this information.

I’ve asked repeatedly, and continue to only get the runaround, over and over and over again. Completely unacceptable.

I’m VERY angry about how I’m being treated. Do not expect my business relationship with you to last much longer. I may also consider making a formal complaint to the Wisconsin Attorney General and Consumer Protection offices.

Never, EVER, have I been treated so poorly before. And please, stop apologizing, because clearly, VERY CLEARLY, you guys really don’t care at ALL.

So hey, answer the question…or don’t. At this point, the damage is already done.

Citibank is clearly and completely failing at their goal of “the highest standard of service in the industry”.