NevDull’s Take On Things

Horrible RoadRunner Performance - Shame on Time Warner Cable of New York City

January 25th, 2008

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.

Entry Filed under: Businesses that Suck, Time Warner Cable