My Time Warner Cable story
So, I have to write this down because it’s at least mildly entertaining.
When I moved into my home a couple months ago, one of my first priorities was to get my internet connection up and running. I scheduled Time Warner Cable (TWC) to come out to the house the day I moved in. At some point that evening I get a call from a guy who says he’s lost and that he’s giving up - it’s already dark outside and he won’t be able to make it in time. But, they’ll send someone out tomorrow morning. Fine. Next morning, nobody shows. I call TWC. They’ll have someone here by 4pm. By this point, I’m ready to get back to work, so I need an internet connection. 4pm comes and goes. No TWC. More phone calls, all on my mobile phone because I have a Vonage phone line - no internet, no land line phone for me. Finally at around 5pm someone shows. He does a little bit of work then comes back in and says, “I’m sorry, the line to your house is completely dead. We’ll have to get a line crew out here to fix it.”
More calls to TWC and it’s finally revealed to me that a line crew will be out in two weeks. Unacceptable. I depend on an internet connection to work. I’ll have to call up the chain at TWC. But one thing is certain: I have no internet and I won’t have it any time soon. So, after setting up my home office, I disassemble it, move my desk to my parents guest room, about a half-hour drive away, and go back to work the next morning. So, I work and I call TWC from my mobile phone line. Lots of calls, lots of being put on hold. When you call TWC and ask for a manager it’s pretty typical to be on hold for 45 minutes.
At some point over the next couple days I decide to check my (totally crappy and regretful) Verizon mobile minutes. I’m already more than 200 minutes over on my allowed minutes for this month. Of course, I’ve never actually even come close to going over before, but without rollover minutes it’s certainly not difficult. I end up changing to a higher plan, just so I can have the time I need to call and sit on hold with TWC.
At some point I’m on a first-name basis with a service manager over at TWC. I think she probably hates me, but nevertheless works it out so that they’ll be out in about five days instead of fifteen. Okay. So a few days come and go and the line crew comes out. Instead of fixing the box that’s on my property, the tunnel under the driveway next door and run the line from the box two houses away. That makes no freaking sense to me, but at this point I don’t care how I get an internet connection, just freaking get me one.
So, I’m online, I’m happy. A couple weeks down the road I get a bill from TWC for something like $700 for unreturned equipment. What? I moved the equipment from my last residence to my new one. I ignore it. I’m just not up to dealing with them on the phone. I thought they’d figure it out. Boy was I wrong.
Days later my cable service gets cutoff for non-payment. I call them and straighten it out. I’ll say this - they’re damn efficient when it comes to collecting your money. I pay them what I actually owe them, get the unreturned equipment thing squared away and within a few minutes my connection is back on.
I’m not sure if it’s related to my service getting cutoff or not, but soon after my internet connection slows to a crawl. I call their tech people. They don’t see a problem in my area. But something’s wrong. I explain that I think it’s a DNS resolution issue. I’m not sure they have any idea what I’m talking about. So, I decide to email them. A few detailed messages later and I’m still getting scripted responses, so I give up on that angle.
I finally decide - you know what, fuck them. I’m switching to DSL and satellite TV. I had been eyeing the pretty satellite TV brochure I got in the mail a few days earlier. Actually I could pretty much care less about TV. The only thing I care about is watching hockey games occasionally. But I need a totally clean break from TWC. I call around. To make a long sub-plot short: I cannot get DSL in my area. I live in a new construction area that’s fairly rural. Oh well. If it’s “high-speed” (and I say that with sarcasm just oozing from my pores) internet I want, it’s TWC I’ll get. Oooh, yes it’s true, I’m so (un)happy to be stuck with you TWC.
A few days later and I’m still being charged $45/month for the AOL dial-up version of the internet and now the TV is going out too. I tell you what, when you call TWC and tell them your television signal is bad, they act like you’re losing blood. I hang up the phone and a TWC van pulls up in front of my house with red lights flashing. The service man gets out of the truck wearing a Jeffrey Bewkes mask. Well, okay, not really. But they were here the next day. They tell me that the line to my house is bad, again. They’ll have to get a line crew out. Again, they are johnny-on-the-spot. The line guy is out over the weekend. I see a TWC van going up and down the street. I figured I’d walk over and say hello and let him know that he’s driven past my house about twelve times. He’s messing with a cable box down the road and muttering something about engineering maths. But he’s there on a weekend and he’s a good guy. He tells me cable for the whole neighborhood is screwed up. Something’s wrong with their network on my street. But, he rubs some cream on it or something and gets it running. A network engineer will be out within a couple days.
My tv is working but my internet connection still sucks. DNS takes forever to resolve. Loading google.com takes 30 seconds. Loading slashdot.org takes over a minute and half the time I don’t even get the styled version of the page, just text. A day or two later there’s a knock at my door and a well-dressed TWC employee with a business card informs me he’s re-splicing the neighborhood. A small army of Time Warner Cable vans is crawling the streets. It’s a little spooky. They’re finally fixing the broken cable boxes, including the one on my property line. Of course, neither me nor anyone else is actually hooked up to that one, but hey, it’s standing proud and ready for action.
A couple hours later the nice, well-dressed man re-appears at my door and tells me that Anderson Cooper will be by my house tomorrow with a fruit basket and sorry for my trouble. I think Fuck Yeah! because I thought Anderson Cooper was a doofus on The Mole, but he’s great as the only actual journalist on CNN. But then I realized the whole Anderson Cooper part was just in my head, but the guy did apologize. And lo and behold, web pages are loading quickly. I’m happy and ready for more web programming action!
Then about 5 minutes later my cable modem is again playing that game where it acts like a dial up. I tell it to stop, but it doesn’t listen. So I drive to Chapel Hill and trade it in for a new one. My new modem is doing the same thing so I call TWC technical support. About half-way into the conversation where they keep re-assuring me that nothing is wrong, even though I’ve tried several computers hooked directly to the cable modem, I get cut off, because my phone is internet-based and my connection blows. I call back again and get someone that asks me to do a traceroute. Hey, this person maybe knows what she’s talking about and we’re making headway into the problem. The traceroute is stars for every hop, even the first one. For those of you who’ve actually read this far and don’t know what that means - it’s proof that my connection sucks, everything is timing out. The tech support person asks me to connect directly to my cable modem. She’s going to do some work on it. In my excitement I say okay and promptly remove the ethernet cable from my router. Oops. No router means no phone. Bye bye helpful and knowledgeable lady. I’ll send Anderson Cooper and his fruit basket your way.
I call back on my mobile phone (and think about how the only reason I have a higher allotment of mobile minutes is because of TWC in the first place). I get a guy who is less knowledgeable but really eager to help. It sounds like it’s his first week on the job or something. He sees the notes from my last call. We re-run the traceroute. This time I get some results on the first 7 or 8 hops and he asks me to read them to him. What? You want me to read these freaking results to you. Again, for those who have actually read this far and who don’t know what a traceroute looks like, imagine reading the VIN numbers for every car on your block over your mobile phone. Seriously. I beg the guy for another way to do it. He actually tells me he’ll get fired if I copy and paste these numbers to a Backpack page and tell him the link. He tells me “I have a family to feed.” Woah. This is getting creepy. So I start reading him the IP adresses, domain names, and every thousandth of a fucking millisecond for each hop. We actually make it through the first 6 hops. All the while my mobile phone connection is sputtering. I was worried about it cutting off. Of course, my worries were justified, the phone cutoff.
IIRC I sort of stumbled through the house ranting at the walls. TWC had reduced me to an incoherent, enraged, directionless fool. At some point, I decided to re-try opendns. My router is an 802.11b dinosaur that doesn’t actually support the configuration needed for opendns. What I didn’t realize is that you can set it up on your computer. I gave it a shot. And miracle of all freaking miracles, it worked!!! The internet was “high-speed” again. Can I get a w00t?!
Of course, going back to my initial call with TWC I suspected that something was wrong with DNS. Instead of listening to me, they just assumed the problem was on my end and that I was misdiagnosing the issue or just making shit up. Either that, or their support protocol demands that we jump through 7000 hoops before they even consider that the issue is on their network, not mine. Whatever.
The moral of this twisted tale is: DO NOT USE TIME WARNER CABLE DNS SERVERS. All that writing and just that one moral. Well, I really just needed to document this and get it off my chest. Later, much later, I’ll read this and laugh about it. For now, the frustration is still fresh.