I’ve got a lot to say about Time Warner Cable of New York and New Jersey in the coming days and weeks. I’ll start you out with this screenshot of just the kind of slow speeds I’m getting on a regular basis. 150ms ping to the first hop isn’t infrequent, as well as 10% packet loss to the first hop as well…
At 3AM, I can get 19mbps download on that speed test (I pay for 20mbps Road Runner Extreme). Between 7pm and midnight? The speed tests sometimes show as high as 2mbps or so, but will vary from minute to minute down into the hundreds of kilobits per second. As you can see in the screenshot I included, I’m testing at 220kbps.
Road Runner has sent techs out twice. Both said that the signal looked fine, but one replaced the cable modem. Both said that a service call would be opened for the “plant” folks to do something. One, upon my geeky pleading (I poured on the victim bit… but it was genuine… the tech support line is 30 minutes on hold to have someone run me through the exact same steps: unplug the router, plug in a computer, disable the firewall, disable antivirus, run the speed test. “We have to send a tech out to you”. Lather, rinse, repeat.) mentioned “upgrades” which had been done quite a bit north of me, but hadn’t been done this far down yet. I inquired about the schedule, and he said that he hadn’t been told, even after asking.
Frustrated, I submitted a complaint with the City of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications. Unfortunately, I was told that their influence about complaints about cable companies is limited to cable television issues, and not Internet access. But he did mention that they were aware of the node-splitting upgrade that Time Warner is performing on Manhattan.
Of course, node-splitting is a way to mitigate oversubscription problems. Too many users on one node, and the internet bandwidth to that node is saturated by the sheer traffic volume.
But if Time Warner has been planning node-splitting, they’ve known about capacity issues.
So why haven’t they offered in any of my multiple interactions with them to a) downgrade the level of service I’m subscribed to because they can’t honestly offer the service when peak time is so incredibly far from what they’ve sold me, b) offer to lower the pricing on my upgraded package until the upgrade happens (and tell me when it would), or c) at least OFFICIALLY ADMIT THAT THERE IS A PROBLEM.
I’ve got some thoughts about how I’ll proceed from here, and I’ll document what happens better and more real-time (this problem began in the fall and has gotten progressively worse).
But alas, it’s bedtime for now.
Feels like stuff should be normal. - by
18 comments ↓
I switched to Speakeasy just for this reason….. lots more money but much better support and speed. (I know about some issues but they are the best in my area)
I switched to Speakeasy while in New Jersey and while in my first apartment in New York because of the poor quality of service offered by Time Warner. My typical MO was to order RoadRunner when I first move into a place because of the speed of provisioning, then get Speakeasy DSL (6M/768k) as time allowed.
When I moved into my current apartment, I made all of the arangements to have the service moved. Turned out that Verizon later told Speakeasy that the service couldn’t be provided because of a copper -> fiber -> copper transition somewhere in the path from the CO to the building.
My choices are very limited, which is why I have no choice but to try to get this resolved instead of avoiding it.
705k/945k this morning. Yeah, faster upload than download. That’s how screwed up the situation is here. You know that it’s a sign of bad things, I know that it’s a sign of bad things, Time Warner would like to have me on hold for a while and then have a tech come out and do nothing rather than admitting to their inability to provide the contracted service.
I have the same problem, very fustrating, and I live in Ohio. It’s not just a new york thing. Time Warner cable is bad across the board in my opinion.
I’ve had good download speeds in Manhattan but dumped RoadRunner for Earthlink though it comes down the same pipe. Cheaper IP phone service from Earthlink too.
Well time warner is notorious for having poor service.
just because they are big company don’t make them perfect. they have so many subscribers that it’s impossible to keep everyone of them perfectly happy and their “system” working perfect. you should keep in mind that problems happen due to weather, animals, vandalism ect… I do agree that the customer service group needs a LOT of work but when you have angry people all over the country pissed off calling they are probably not going to like their job so they dont care and don’t last long. and that’s the problem. so if you don’t like it leave. do you think dish or anyone else is going to be perfect? not so much
@CST:
I don’t expect perfection.
I do expect a sincere effort, and some measure of honesty.
I did leave TimeWarner for internet access, I finally got Speakeasy to provide DSL service (which ran me right into the other pipe-into-the-house monopoly, Verizon), which is better, except when Verizon techs mistakenly disconnect my line in the basement of the building next door, which has happened twice.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you misunderstood the situation. I was paying $70/mo for a premium level of service, which Time Warner was incapable of providing at peak times. Even worse, the level of service was below that of their lowest offering. I found it unusable, and was treated like an idiot each time I called. Techs who visited my home knew there were systemic problems. The city of New York’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications knew of the problem. Everyone knew, but the company would not admit it to me, would not fix the problem, and they even refused to terminate my service over the telephone.
The problems I saw were indicative of a network which is vastly overloaded, of a monopoly provider with little to no incentive to resolve the problem. Your suggestion to use the free market to find a resolution (“switch”) ignores to some extent the restriction on the free market which comes along with monopolies.
As for the weather, animals, and vandalism — simply put, that’s not my problem. Yes, they are problems for the company to solve. But that neither explains nor excuses many months of subpar and fairly unusable services.
I’m now paying $150/mo for 8/1mbps service through Speakeasy. More than double what I paid Time Warner for service rated at twice as fast on the download, and equivalent on the upload.
I’m not cheap, and I resent the implication that I’m just a whiny bitch and shouldn’t expect to be politely provided the services for which I pay.
I’m in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and just got TW Road Runner. Between 10 – 15% packet loss to the first hop. It’s really unacceptable service. I called yesterday and got escalated to Tier 3 support, and they told me to get a different modem. New modem is in place, and the packet loss is the same of course. I’ll keep calling them to fix their network, but I recommend that anyone else considering options in the NY area avoid TW.
I am just about to move to Manhattan. Am I better off to get the Speakeasy DSL at 6/768 then to take my chances with TWC advertised? What about using Earthlink? Is Earthlink the same service on the same system, i.e., unreliable?
Do you konw of TV over internet services so that I could justify getting the faster Speakeasy DSL2 and not get cable at all. Thanks,
JimmyN
I have to say that I’m pretty happy with the ADSL2 8/1 service, though it’s expensive. Regarding TV, I have a Mac Mini connected to my 40″ 1080p LCD TV, and Hulu full-screen isn’t horrible, though it’s obviously not like watching HD, even the way TW compresses the hell out of some of it.
Hi, my Sister is experiencing the EXACT same problems. She lives in California and I bought her a new computer recently. She has continued inconsistent connection. TimeWarner will not admmitit is their RoadRunner Serivce and telling us it is the PC so Dell came out and noticed TimeWarner had not sinc the modem to their system so that was that. Well back to the same thing AGAIN. We have spent countless HOURS onthe phone and have had them come out atl least 4 times. Suggestions???
This is all very interesting. I live in Tribeca, and my neighbor and I fought with TW for months over intermittent slow-downs; took days off from work to wait for five different levels of techies who knew nothing. What I’ve discovered since stumbling on this series of posts are that their speedtest is also bogus. I just got 6900 from them when speakeasy is consistently showing speeds one half or one third of TW’s. I also just got 1900 from another site.
Somebody should consider a class action lawsuit. Can’t wait for FIOS.
There seems to be HUGE amounts of mis-information and a total lack of understanding of what trace routes mean, and what ping time and packet loss truely mean accross hops to a destination. It would help if you understood what these things truely reflect prior to making poor assumptions based on a lack of knowledge of what you are looking at.
You need to totally ignore “hops” along the way to your destination and focus on the responses to your destination. IE: Those routers are not your destination, and don’t give any thought to dropping your packets, not responding, or waiting long periods of time to respond to pings. Why you ask??? That is because the purpose of the router is not to respond to ping requests, end of story. In fact, counting hops in general is silly, mainly because most routers are set to be transparent and will never show as a hop in the first place especially inside the confines of your ISP and the confines of the ISP of your destination. Why??? Because the ISP Network Admins don’t want them responding, because of silly script kiddies DDOS attacks among other things.
As an example…. If you see ping responses from a destination of 35ms, but one of the routers along the way responses at 350ms…. IGNORE IT! There is nothing wrong other than the router is busy “routing”, and doesn’t care enough to respond quickly.
What if I see hops, but they never respond… you see * * *. Guess what, nothing is wrong, the admin probably told the router to ignore your silly pings and not respond. It is only the destination response that matters.
It is very possible your ISP may have a CMTS, and several routers, switches, and optical gear between you and the edge device. Guess what, you may only see that entire path as one hop, although you crossed 15 different devices.
One more thing…. when you run a speedtest, you should only judge the speed of our ISP based on results within their network, not accross the Country and through 3 different peer networks and the network of a destination address. They don’t control those, duh!
You should also run multiple tests over 20 minutes, to insure that you are not getting poor results based on utilization of the speedtest server itself, or the link it rides. Alot of speedtest servers still sit on 100Mbps links. 5 20Mbps tests, and the next one is skewing the results for everyone.
Last item before I let you whiny kids out of class. If you are gonna cry and post screenshots, include a screenshot of the traffic monitor on your desktop. Just so everyone knows if your not getting poor results because of streaming porn or latest pirated movie via torrent.
Class is out of session!!!
Alright, this is stupid. I pay for 8 Mbps service, and I’ve got 2 downloads running right now. 700 Mb file, 40 Kb/s average. The other is a BitTorrent: 65 Kb/s. I mean, And what’s really stupid: Both of my routers and my modem: full blast. I get 5-6 second lag on Brawl. It’s stupid.
I live in Youngstown, OH. I’ve been experiencing bad internet speed. I’ve called four times and I’ve to go through the same procedures everytime- Customer support, technical support, national helpdesk and finally third level tech support. They all say that there is no problem at their end. They ask me to run two different kinds of speed test and its always less than half the speed that I should get.
So, they send a technician and he replaces the modem. In the past four weeks they have replaced the modem twice and still the problem lingers.
What a shame!
Speed problems and issues with Times Warner Cable and Internet of NYC continue here in Queens New York. I am at an “It’s all Here” level WITHOUT Time Warner Phone Service. Per customer service I am at the highest tier level of service and my Internet speed should be minimum at 10 mps or better.
Ya, sure, like from midnight to 8 am or 9 am I get 20 to 25 mps, At 9 am on the service gets continually slower until from 5 pm to when it becomes less than 3 mps (its 6 pm now and I am getting 2.1 mps in 5 tests in 30 minutes).
From 7 pm to midnight the Time Warner Cable of NYC Internet speed rates service can average less than 900 kps to 1.5 mps over 30 minutes of multiple tests. This happens every day.
I had to have the cable modem replaced a few months ago. The TW technician says that Time Warner now has about 10 Internet speed ‘service levels’ although they are not announced – consumers are not fairly informed. (The Time Warner Cable of NYC for New York and New Jersey lists 3 levels)
It’s time to reduce my Time Warner cable internet and cable subscription level to ‘Standard’ where they promise 10 MPS. 10 MPS I can deal with in the early AM. The speed degradation thought the day probably is not worse.
I pay around 70 bucks for the 20mbps connection and have the exact same issue. My connection speed this morning was 561kbps. That is waaaay off.
Class action lawsuit? i’m down
[...] 3.0, I get 50Mbps down, 5Mbps up. And I actually get it. Since I’ve posted before about the negative experiences I had with Time Warner’s RoadRunner service at a previous apartment, I’ll update it with some information about how one individual turned around my customer [...]
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