Review of RoadRunner CableAll reviews of |  about |
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Well, I was waiting for FIOS - but it seems like the co-op board does not want it in this building. We were going to get wired for free as a test building, but it ain't happening. Anyway, enough of that. I have to settle for TWC for now, so I upgraded to the Wideband service. Here I am thinking it will only add another 50.00 to the bill - the wideband is 99.00 - I figured I deduct the RR service and Turbo for a total of 48.00 and add the 99 so my bill would only go up about 50.00., however, my bill has gone up but about 85.00! I had the :It's all here" package before which included all channels and premiums and road runner. Now that Road runnder is removed, they have broken the pricing down differently, and I am charged for BASIC, STANDARD and the Premium packages PLUS the Wideband. My bill this month is 342.00 - which includes the 40.00 install fee and about 26.00 in partial month charges. I gotta call to find out what that's about - so I figure the bill would be about 275.00 hereafter. I need to call to find out how to get this lower. I do have all the premium movie channels, 1 regular DTV and 1 HDTV / DVR box as well. Anyway, it seems TV service has improved somewhat. I used to get a lot of freezing / blockiness, etc - especially on HD channels, and the On -Demand channels never worked right. Picture quality is better and the on-demands finally work. As for the internet part, the 50 down and 5 up has been working as it's supposed to, even during peak hours. Let's see how long that lasts. One thing I do not like is the updates they pushed to the boxes - now you cannot show the time on the box when it is off. The channel is displayed, which defies comprehension. WHY??? I could see if the channel could be watched with the box off, like my mother's Cablevision box does, but you can't - so what's the point of displaying the channel at all times? I like to view the channel when I am watching TV and view the time when the box is off. It used to work this way, but not any more - it's either one of the other. Maybe I'll just set it to always display the clock. Anyway, I am both happy and mad. Happy because services have improved and mad because the price has gone WAY up. Followup comments:
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Service continues to degrade in terms of reliability. EVERY day, volatile results. Last night was able to speedtest at 10.8/969, today 1.7/412. This is NOT a random result. Again, it happens like this every day. PLEASE, stop the monopoly! If TWC is going to be given coverage contracts, then why the hell can't our representatives require at least a given level of quality and reliability or face competition from other cable providers? I see TWCs ads on TV every day, they flood my mailbox with postcards ... all about bringing more money in when they cannot even get it right for those of us who have already been paying for years. Is this Iran? Update: 9/10/09 TWC just can't get it together. Calling them about the monthly outages is simply nerve racking and an excercise in total frustration. To this day, they continue to use the "It's your router sir" excuse. ARGHHHH, haven''t they been forced to at least get passed that as people and the net have matured? Oh wait, they are a monopoly and as long as their lobbyists continue to provide hookers to our Congressman and other representatives,they will always have complete control and power ... my bad. TW just sucks. I have been with the old @Home network, Cox, Comcast and Charter and NEVER had such crappy speeds. TW does NOT deliver the speed the promise and nobody in that company ever seems to know what is going on. There are some bright points in Tier 3 support, but it took almost 5 months and 60 calls to get to that level. And even with them, service still not any better ... but at least they are working. Oh, one more thing, to date have not received a single credit from billing despite numerous attempts. True Nazi biatches in that dept. Followup comments:
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15/768 At best I usually get the service I am promised. It could be better. Followup comments:
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When Time Warner Cable/RoadRunner works, it's great, but that's becoming uncommon in the recent months. The speeds are pretty good when I'm not experiencing poor connectivity, but they have substantially decreased from what they were a year ago. I used to get 15Mbps down and about 2Mbps up on a very regular basis and now it seems that I've been bumped down to 10Mbps/1Mbps again and the service has now become utterly unreliable. On a nearly daily basis now, I see my speeds drop to incredibly low numbers. Web browsing is noticeably slower, and speed tests run on average around 3Mbps down on average to about 1Mbps down for hours on most nights. Calling their technical support team is almost always a complete waste of time. There is, apparently, almost never an issue with the service on their end and it seems that they find it easier to just blame every configuration on the customer's end. Now that I've received the direct line to Tier 3 technical support, I get to skip the nonsense of plugging my computer in to the modem every time, but they are still completely unable to find or resolve any issues with the service. The order and installation process was good. I was able to order the service that day at work and run down to the local office on my way home to get my self-install kit, which was great. I really like being able to install services on my own since it's much more convenient for me and generally results in things working "out of the box" more frequently than it does when a tech. comes out to my house. RoadRunner's online offering (like bill pay, webmail, homepage, etc...) have become substantially more reliable and more pleasing to the eye over the recent year or so. Their services seem to be more useful and reliable and are much better than other ISPs that I've had in the past. Their new 'homepage' feature apparently removed the ability for customers to FTP files to free online space, which was disappointing. Web management was replaced with a Flash-based web editing kit that reminds me of iWeb, but with very little features. It's nice for the beginner, I guess. It seems like the quality of service on Time Warner Cable/RoadRunner has degraded steadily and substantially from when they purchased Adelphia in my area. When we were on Adelphia, the service was consistently fantastic and I rarely experienced any issue with my connection. Also, when I called for support I was generally directed to a regionally-relevant and close call center or office, which was great. Nowadays you get directed to somewhere out of state for sales calls and out of the country for technical calls. It's extremely difficult to get any technical issues resolved due to the language barrier on many occasions, which further adds to my frustration when dealing with an issue. I've recently downgraded my service from Turbo (10Mbps) to Standard (6Mbps) in an attempt to stop wasting my money. I generally don't even receive Standard speeds, so I figured I'd stop paying more for the same poor service. I saved about $10 a month and if I find that I can't consistently get at least close to the 6Mbps that Standard offers, I'm going to dump their service completely and switch to DSL, where I'm capped at 3Mbps unfortunately. Followup comments:
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Time-Warner North Texas President Moel contacted me quickly when I emailed him. He put a competent and motivated technical manager on this issue. He communicated well with me and worked with me to monitor the line when the outages were in progress and get knowledgeable techs out here while the outage was actually in progress. They put appropriately valued filters on my line and I now have reliable service. -- It's been good for a week, but it will take another week or two of reliable service to prove that it is really fixed since I've had it go 10 days or so without a problem and then become unusable more than once over the last three months. I am still getting timeouts on the first three hops, but the packet loss has been reduced to the point that it is 0% most of the time. When I am getting packet loss, it is around 1%, which is perfectly acceptable. I'm still monitoring it and will update further. The issue, as I see it, is that TWC is responsive to typical problems, but when it gets into more complex issues, it is difficult to get attention from someone competent with the required tools, and authority to resolve the issue. In my mind, this means that if you subscribe to TWC and get a good reliable connection, that's great and is likely a better deal than AT&T 6Mbs download and 748K upload for $45.00 per month. Lesson I learned is that if you have a problem with TWC and it isn't resolved quickly, don't argue with them for 3 months. Instead contact their Corporate Office of the President in NY or the TWC North Texas President immediately TWC has a problem with the procedures for handling the more difficult issues. For example, it was only after I contacted the executives that I discovered they could open an intermittent ticket and monitor the situation over time. So, my problem is not that the standard techs couldn't get the service going properly, it is that I kept going round and round with them because no one was willing to escalate the ticket to the proper level to get it resolved. You would think that after replacing the modem, and sending techs out multiple times, TWC would want to escalate it to a level that could fix it. Instead, they kept running the same maze to failure over and over. This is a problem I've seen with other organizations as well. They have the resources to fix a problem, but they give the customer the run-around until the customer either gives up and lives with the problem, cancels the service, or raises Hell with top level executives. I'll be interested to read future TWC reviews and see whether they do a better job at handling complex issues. Liz FURTHER UPDATE Monday October 5th, 2009 Contacted investor relations last week. Someone contacted me quickly. They came out, tinkered, and made a few adjustments. Unfortunately, when my Internet service went out on Thursday afternoon for 9 hours, and I had continuing problems on Friday and throughout the weekend, my contact had gone for a long weekend and I couldn't get anyone to take interest in the problem while the service was actually out. This has been the problem all along. The service is intermittent and it is impossible to contact anyone who has the skills, motivation, and authority to investigate while the service is down. They keep working on it, but they won't get it fixed until they investigate while the service is actually down. I'm beginning to think they don't want to investigate the problem while the service is down because then they'd actually have to fix it. As long as they can't find a problem when the service is up, they can pretend that it isn't their problem and I'm just a chronic complainer. UPDATE: Have been having problems with Road-Runner now for over 3 months. It takes 1 to 2 hours to get escalated to the proper customer support level, explaining the problem over and over and over again because they don't have the account history in front of them. They repeatedly suggest things that have already been tried. I've offered to work with them to find the problem, but they refuse. I've requested direct contact with someone when it goes out so that it doesn't take 2 hours on the phone and chat to get to the department authorized to handle this situation. They refused. My Internet connection is consistently too slow to use 10-20 hours per week during the 8AM - 8PM time frame - Usually for 1 to 2 hours at a time. Have had two outages in the last month that lasted more than 24 hours during which the modem can't even acquire an ip address. I haven't had as many outages in the last two weeks - since I raised holy living Hell with them and they did something to the wiring in the building (I'm in a Turtle Creek highrise). However, the upstream packet loss is consistently 8%. The signal-to-noise ratio on the line is marginal. So, even when the speed isn't degraded, it's still crap. They replaced the modem, which did nothing because the modem wasn't the problem. The problem has to do with the way this building is wired. Occasionally, someone will connect something weird to their cable outlet in the wiring segment I'm on and everything goes to Hell. Time-Warned knows this. In the past, when this has happened, they come out and go through the wiring until they find the problem. I've lived here for over 20 years and have had them enter my unit in the past to make sure I wasn't the one causing the latest problem. It doesn't happen that often -- probably 2 or 3 times per year in a high-rise with a master contract for cable service for all 400 condos in the building. I've had it with Time-Warner / Road-Runner and will be going to an AT&T dry ADSL as soon as I determine that there's not a better deal from someone else. ORIGINAL POST: Had Southwestern Bell, Speakeasy, and Quest at this same location. All were reliable and consistently performed up to specification. Switched to RR / Time Warner because of lower price for higher speed. (This is over a 15 year period and started with SWBell dual ISDN.) I NEVER had an outage or problem with any of the above over the entire 15 year period. -- Well, one time my service went dead. I walked out into the hallway and saw the phone guy in the utility closet. I told him what had just happened. Oops, he had disconnected a wire that was mislabeled. He reconnected and labeled it correctly and I never had another problem. RR has two packages: 7MBS and 10MBS. We have the faster 10MBS. Install was fine. Motorola cable modem supplied by RR. Basically, the service has been good until about three weeks ago when I started having intermittent speed problems. One minute the speed would be fine, next minute a light-weight html page won't load. the speed bounces between 28K and 52Mbs. When it slows down. this can last for hours. Resetting the modem, forcing a new ip-address, etc. have no effect. Here's my conclusion: Since the speed is sometimes 52Mbs and the service level is for 10Mbs, it seems to me that the wiring and modem must be OK, which leads me to think that when someone on my wiring segment turns something on (or uses it) the speed drops and when they turn it off (or stop using it, the speed is back to normal. Following is how I came to that conclusion: After detailed testing, I believe it to be a problem with another customer on the same wiring segment as us. (High-rise building, connections are strung together like Christmas tree lights and sometimes another user on your "string" or wiring segment can screw up your connection.) When I contacted RR, I kept getting bounced back and forth until I got to a high-enough level support. Had to tell each person what was going on over again. They mostly didn't understand what I was talking about. I told them about the issues in this building, but they didn't want to hear about it. Their response was to do a ring test. They decided the modem is bad, but told me that if it was a wiring problem, I would have to pay $50.00. I've tried three routers with one computer (and no others) connected: the D-Link I normally use, a Linksys, and a Zyxel -- all wired, no wireless. All of them exhibit the same intermittent speed problem. Direct connect to the modem with one computer improves the speed, even when using a router is slow - but the direct connection is still not up to the contracted speed. Seems like that would indicate that the line is "fragile" -- that is, it appears to work OK under the best circumstances, but a little extra stress on it and it starts dropping packets (or it can absorb packet loss when the traffic is light. Or, it could be a RR problem when handing DHCP off to a router. Or, it could be a modem setting (but, unlikely since nothing has been changed and everything is on battery backup). Or, it could be another user on the same wiring segment. Or, it could be a bad modem. I'm betting it isn't the wiring in my unit and I am betting it isn't a bad modem. As I said, I think it is a wiring problem in the building, but not my unit. My logic is that no changes have been made in my unit, the cable tv on the same connection works fine, when the speed slows down, it lasts for at least an hour, sometimes 3 or 4 hours. Resetting the modem has no effect. The slowdowns tend to occur several times per day at about the same time. The problem started two weeks ago. Before that, there was no problem at all. If it is a wiring problem, it would be something done by another RR customer on my wiring segment - for which I do not want to pay $50.00 to have repaired. We'll see what happens when they replace the modem. They made an appointment for this morning, but they are "running late." Followup comments:
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Insight/Roadrunner – Reynoldsburg In August, 2008 I moved from my house in Merion Village, Columbus 43207 to Century City which is a large apartment complex in Reynoldsburg, Ohio 43068. The only cable ISP available in Century City apartment complex is Insight Communications or Dish Network satellite. Insight offers the same 3 services that Time Warner offers which are cable, TV and telephone. Insight uses Roadrunner carrier lines leased from Time Warner and the speeds both down and up are much slower than the advertised 7G down and 512K up. Insight offers or sells their services at the apartment complex through one of their outside Sales Reps. The sales rep wasn't very responsive to my phone calls so I had to call him multiple times to get the service set up. I've had constant problems with their cable TV phone services. Their tech support reps via phone seem to be very uneducated about the technologies they're supposed to be supporting, can't troubleshoot on their own, they read everything from script, and their English is so bad that they're hard to understand. I spent 2 hours on the phone with the web page tech support and still don't have my 8 page web site available for viewing. Followup comments:
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A few weeks before this review the internet and phone was COMPLETELY gone for 5 hours for maintenance that no one was warned about. Followup comments:
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For the most part, the service has been pretty dependable at least at a baseline level of performance. I don't consider their burst/boost not being sustained when saying this, but there are times when service throughput is considerably lower than the turbo service we pay for. I won't attribute it to throttling because we have not been doing anything that they could reasonably throttle us for in the last few months. All ISP's have a network of their own equipment your traffic has to traverse before it makes it to the internet, I understand that. But I do think that making your traffic go all the way to Atlanta and back to NC before it leaves their network to reach a server located in Charlotte is a bit too much. We noticed things like that when trying to figure out why we had lag spikes etc. trying to game on a server we were renting. 8-9 rr.com hops with each adding more and more latency to what we would see on the first NON-rr.com hop. Customer service is pretty crummy in our experience. Once we were BILLED $25 when we were supposed to be credited $25 for service being out most of a week. (there was road construction on the road we live on and they kept cutting the cable). We tried 3 times calling custsvc to find someone that would listen to us and remove the $25 charge, and credit it to us. We finally gave up arguing. Another time, our cable modem died. It was on a Saturday evening and their support folks said they could not get a tech out until Monday. We asked about buying our own modem (since they had a nice selection of them at Best Lie), whether they could just reprogram our service with the replacement modem's MAC address, and if we did that could they get us going that night. They said yes that was definitely do-able - just make sure when we call that we tell them we need a supervisor because they are the only ones that have access to the screens needed to reprogram our service for the new MAC address. So we went and bought one. I actually bought a Motorola model that we had had before issued by TWC to make sure it was something I knew would work. I spent a total of 5 hours on the phone across several phone calls trying to find ONE PERSON who could actually get our service working. They all said they had programmed our service with the new MAC address, but all attempts to access websites were redirected to a page that said "please contact TWC to activate your self-install service", pings and traceroutes would go no farther than their local gateway, and all DNS lookups sent to their DNS servers responded with the same redirect IP. Which tells me our end was fine but their aggregator/router wasn't letting us out. When we finally got sent to the "Tier 2"/supervisor on 3rd or 4th call, somebody who supposedly has access to "the other screen" and "knows what they're doing", I very much felt like I was being led through a "Tier 2 Support" set of script-based troubleshooting questions. They were still blaming everything on my computer, but now had slightly more technical-sounding excuses for doing so. She still wasn't grasping the significance of the main symptoms I was experiencing, and basically insisted I had to run the IP stack shell commands on my (known perfectly-good working) windows XP "tech support call system" because I had something wrong with my registry network settings or spyware or something. All attempts to clue her in on the level of computer expertise she was dealing with on the other end of the phone failed. Rather than listen to what I was trying to tell her, she continued trying to impress me with her "expertise" such as knowing I had a Dell machine because the first few bytes of the MAC address on my NIC identify it as a Dell Broadcom. (woopty-doo! I can look at the modem's bridge table too... and in fact already had..). But if I didn't go through the steps to reset my IP stack she wasn't going to "help" anymore. I finally gave up and told her the problem was solved because I could tell we were never going to get where we needed to go with her. The next morning (Sunday) I called back and told them if they didn't get our mess working we would be disconnecting ALL of our service first thing Monday morning and I would use dialup if I had to. They found "the other screen" where the MAC address of our replacement modem had not yet been put into, and got us working in just a few minutes. They also got a tech out about an hour later, and they replaced our bought modem with another issue one. It took whoever he called about 2 minutes to switch MAC's in our profile. (you know, usually techs don't have to call the same "support" folks that customers have to deal with) I am probably not the only person who frequents these forums who has any idea how frustrating it is to know more about computers, networking, etc. than the bozos you have to talk to on the other end of the phone, yet has to depend on them and play their little script games to get anything accomplished when something is wrong with their service. Then there was the time a few months ago when we decided to get digital phone service re-instated. We had it for a while previously and still had the voice-enabled Motorola cable modem. We turned off the digital phone svc because we were trying to cut our expenses and couldn't rationalize paying for cellphones and digital phone. Anywho, we thought getting it turned back on would be relatively simple since we hadn't changed our wiring and still had the modem. We anticipated a tech dispatch but were expecting it to be fairly uneventful. We were told there would be no charge for the dispatch. What happened instead was, they sent a contractor out who had such a thick accent we could hardly understand him. He insisted upon installing a "NID" next to the (inactive) Sprint NID so they could tie into the inside wiring. *ALL* of our inside telephone wiring is run to a punchboard on a 66 block inside the house, and since we no longer had Sprint phone service the one wiring run going out to the Sprint NID wasn't even relevant. (it was disconnected, in fact, since our dialtone was coming from the cable modem... also located inside the house....). He said policy required this TWC phone NID (it didn't the first time we got digital phone...). He did call his supv and ask, and got pretty much the same answer. I asked and was told there would be no charge to install this NID we didn't need. (Note, this is NOT the usual TWC NID, there was already one of those there). I had to actually go hook the run going outside back up so he could get "backfeed" connection/continuity outside. He still had a lot of trouble understanding how to get done what he needed to outside. The last time I went outside to check on his "work", he had taken a piece of WOOD and driven it into the ground as a stake to attach the NID to. My piece of wood. I assumed it was scrap, and he asked me if he could keep another piece he'd found laying by the deck. I said sure, why not. This was utterly ridiculous since there was an old (unused) metal TWC stake in the ground with an old unused cable line about 2 feet away. He could have used that metal stake, even if he had to pull it up and move it closer to the Sprint NID. However at this point I basically didn't care because I had already decided the minute he left it was going away. What I didn't realize until a few days later was that the wood he used was actually the leveling/footing pieces of wood under the steps of our deck! Because the next time I used those steps they wobbled, and when I went to look why, I saw my leveling pieces under the base of the steps were gone. Pardon my french, but this pissed me off. Then we got billed $10 for the NID installed that we didn't even need, and he used MY @#$@#$ WOOD to do his half-butted NID install!! Then the whole consumption based billing debate/mess started. We were charged an extra $25 on one month's bill (about 2 months ago) and with their new "improved" billing detail all we saw was "broadband usage", or "broadband utilization". We had already heard about Greenlight service in Wilson, NC at this point and were very close to making a final decision to actually try to move. Honestly, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. So my advice to anyone looking for broadband service is, if Roadrunner is the only game in town, or the only real "competition" for broadband in your area is Sprint/Embarq DSL, you might as well get Roadrunner. The service usually works pretty well. I just hope you never need to call tech support or customer service, because God help you when it isn't working. We are moving to Wilson, NC and getting Greenlight (»www.greenlightnc.com) fiber optic service. We'll be starting off with 40 megabit symmetrical internet service, for roughly $185 a month with digital phone and 81 channels of TV included in the package, all of which run over the fiber optic. I am told that with Greenlight there is no degradation of your internet service performance when you are watching TV. We'll see.  Cheers, MachRider Followup comments:
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RoadRunner Cable
(198)
(83)
Brooklyn,Kings,NY
Contract price not specified. 
about 2 days
"Seems to be working better now for both TV and Internet"
"It's gotten VERY expensive adding Wideband 50/5 service!"
"Well, FIOS ain't coming so I'll live with this and hope it stays good"
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TW holds the area with an iron fist 
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