I've had problems with my DSL provider here a while back where certain addresses were not accessable. They sent me a new modem, and said there was nothing wrong numerous times. After about a month, I called in because of a complete outage, and they said that they were replacing some equipment. After that outage was fixed, I could finally get to all the addreses that seemed to not work. Coincidence?

i have comcast, which, originally over here in MA. was owned by road runner. I dont know if i'm the only one or not, but i've been having some real issues with the internet. I have a brand new computer thats only a few weeks old, a modem thats about the same age as the new computer, and a router thats only a little under than a year old. Yet for some reason i've been having some real problems with the internet for a little now (about a monthh or 2 now) it goes in and out, for a few hours it'll be down, then it'll go up. I've called the cable guy over (twice) and he really hasnt fixed the problem. hes checked the wiring...it all seems okay...unless its our router...i think its comcast...

I've had two TW RR outages over the past couple of days. Don't know for how long, as I was at the office and had to reset my modem when I got home. Were the first outages in months, so my guess is it's not just you guys.

RR is awful about that. I use their service in NC, and usually when I have a problem, they say it's my machine. I am a network admin for an ISP so I know if I'm having an issue with my PC or not. Usually I blow past their Tier 1 support, Tier 2 passes me on to Tier 3 which should not be considered advanced support. About a year ago, a Time Warner employee was fidling with cables outside my home in an attempt to hook up a new house next door. I started to have sync problems as soon as he was done. I called RR, and eventually got to their "advanced tech" who told me that it was the modem. I told him about the guy working on the lines, and he disregarded it. I made sure to get his name and direct number. Replaced the modem at the closest Time Warner office which is over an hour from where I live. Had the same problem. Called the guy back and he said it was either the ethernet cable or my NIC..... I proceeded to chew the guy out. Did he honestly think I was going to replace my NIC because of a sync issue? It wasn't getting any signal from their side. Not my problem. I ended up forcibly ending the call. The next morning there was a Time Warner employee playing with the lines, and I had sync again. Their support is ignorant. I can't believe that they pay people to make up BS like that.

Level 1 support: "Obrigado chamando nossa linha de sustentação inglesa. Como podemos nós lhe ajudar?" Level 2 support: "Your equipment needs to be rebooted. If that doesn't work, then try upgrading your equipment." Level 3 support: "I'm sorry you are having this problem. Did you follow the instructions on our web site?" Level 4 support: "Please continue to hold. One of our representitives will be with you shortly..."

We had intermittent problem with road runner for a couple of years. Each time they blamed a cable or a too many filters in the line. Last thing they were willing to try was to replace the cable modem. Once we finally forced them to do that it has worked like a charm.

ISPs ALWAYS have a big trouble, its called Tech Support. Ages ago, when i got my first ADSL, i had some issues that nedded some atention. I learned then, the hard way, that the answer to my troubles is out there, anywhere else but in tech support. Those poor bastards never know anything else but what the screen in front of them tells them, and usually, is not much.

I have had high speed for about 8 years now and have always had problems at one point or another. I tihnk that the trouble is that high speed providers through up new lines and gear so quickly just to get market share that they don't have an accurate way to diagnose the problem. Often times I will have done nothing with my computer and all of the sudden my system starts dropping packets after leaving my "home" network and router system. After calling Crapcast they diagnose and say it must be my router. Typically this response probably gets 60% of the calls resolved, but it seems like more and more issues are occurring that arne't a problem with the users system or network. I truly think it comes down to bad diagnostic tools. www.chictogeek.com www.experienceucd.com

i used to work for a Northeastern cable company / ISP. If an outage wasn't on the "outage board," a CS rep or tech could only do normal troubleshooting... but it wasn't something that was an attempted concealment or an attempt to shift blame the customer. When there were actual outages we knew about, reps were supposed to look them up and tell the customer if he or she is in an affected area. Sometimes the network engineers would only find out about a problem when customers called in to tech support and enough of them showed up in the same area with the same problem to make it worth investigating. It's probably the usual problem ISP tech support has: underpaid tech reps (hey, i left my job there for one that paid double what i was making) -- sometimes even temps, trained or otherwise -- with very poor information trickle-down from the network engineers and field technicians. oh and jr -- it very well could be your router. try connecting a PC straight to the modem and see if it still has the same problems. Also, keep an eye on the cable modem lights when the connection goes out and make a note of it -- explain to the tech when/if you call in again what the lights do when you lose the connection, that could tell him or her a lot.

jrghoull, Does the outage only seem to happen when it gets warm/hot outside? If so, it might be a problem with the coax cable.

It sees that their was a huge outage last night or yesterday from akami, maybe that was something about it? Who knows - i have charter and it always kicks my off my router daily and I have to pull the plug on the router to get reconnected.

Not that I want to defend the telecoms and cable companies. But it's usually not the companies fault, just an incompetent tech who has lost his pateince with his job. The guy who's helping you troubleshoot on the phone, 999 times out of 1000 does not work for the company who you purchase your service from. They're probably a contractor of some sort hired by the provider. Although we can assume the providers may be telling the contractor to deflect calls, I find the idea dubious. I always ask for escalation to a manager if I don't like the answer I'm getting. Demand case numbers and names write everything down. Then three months down the road when it's fixed, contact the billing department of your provider and ask for a rebate on your bill. It's worked for me in the past.

In my experience, Roadrunner has been pretty honest about network outages. Last week after a power outage my internet wouldnt come back up. After talking to RR, I did realize that it was my problem. I am using pfsense for a firewall, and the config didnt load properly when the power came back on. Ooops, I felt like an idiot for even calling. A close friend is an RR tech and he says the louder you scream, the more you will get. i.e. free/reduced service fees. One thing to consider is your modem. This tech, who works on Road Runner all day and all night, has nothing but bad things to say about Toshiba modems, specifically the PCX1100 series. Try to get your cable provider to give you a new modem. If they wont, then go up to your local compusa, best buy, circuit city, etc and try to get one. Many times they have one that is either free or dirt cheap after rebate (with new service). I had an RCA that worked great. I recently moved to a new home and they gave me a Toshiba. Nothing but problems, I am calling today. Try looking for a status page on your modem. Many times you can view the log and see what is dropping, if the signal got dropped, how much line noise there is. Just google your modem's model number with "status page" or whatever. For my RCA, if I typed 192.168.100.1 in the browser, it displayed everthing I needed to know. For some of the Toshibas, you will need to change some of your IP settings to be able to see that page. I dont know if they throttle it or not, but they advertise 5Mbps down with 384k up and a recent speedtest showed 4.69/359k. Not bad. Hope this helps.

thats what you get with the "cable" guy trying to fix network problems. Its definatly time for comcast to hire tech people and not just "cable guys"

Honestly, yes, they are, though it's unlikely to be due to sinister motives of screwing the customer. More likely, the people on the phone only know about major outages and the technical operations staff don't monitor for every possible minor issue. Only when there's enough customer reports that seem to correllate to a problem does somebody go dig deeper to find that switch with the bad uplink port and reboot or replace it. That's why I tell our customers (not an ISP, internal customers) that they should never assume we know about a problem with their site - if they see one, report it.

I have Adelphia. I had numerous problems with my cable modem losing sync. For whatever reason they sent out 3 techs. After playing with the wires for a while they mentioned their was some weird feedback on my lines and replaced some of the amps in the wall. Also one of the guys who went outside came in and mentioned that someone had forgot to "cap" the wires at the box so my problems might have been related to condensation forming. So they did all that right in front of me, talking to themselves about the problems they found. Then when they were done the head guy came to me and told me they couldn't find any problems and didn't know what to tell me. I didn't bother to call him on the fact that I was sitting right there when they mentioned the potential condensation problem, and heard them mention the weird readings on the lines and watched them switch out the stuff in my walls. Why they did this I have no idea. But no problems since that visit.

Sorry for multiple posts... I must have been having equipment problems.

They're all liars.

I have RoadRunner in NC, and the connection is anything but reliable. Some days it's fast, other days it crawls. I notice that my connection gets throttled down when I download torrents (all legal of course). I have an ancient Toshiba modem, and every time I call tech support they just tell me to reboot it, which doesn't solve the problem at all. Ever.

I'm with Charter cable in Texas. Their tech support people have always been really good when i've had problems. Firstly, the answerphone will say "if you live in these zips you may have an outage that we are working on..." Then their techs have always been pretty friendly (and knowledgeable ) and will listen to what i've done to check the situation, including logging into my modem and checking the carrier strength, s/n etc. On a recent outage, I phoned up, explained I had no carrier and that my home network was working (to rule out the PC), and had tried without the router (to rule that out), etc... They said they'd get a technician out in 3 days... the thought of three days without the net was waaaay to much. I went for a walk in search of a broken cable and saw that a few of my neighbours TV's were static (through their windows....) within 2 hrs it was back up and running... Moral: the more that complain the faster it gets fixed.... Ive always found them pretty good, except for when some sales chick tried to upgrade me from 300KBps to 3Mbps telling me its 10 times faster... Bytes vs bits lady...

I used to work for AOL. Any time I was at the house of a friend or family member who used AOL and there was a problem, of course I was expected to solve the issue immediately. AOL customer support was worthless -- sometimes it would take me twenty or thirty minutes to finally convince the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level techs to put me through to the NOC, where I could actually talk to someone who had a clue. Of course, AOL has thousands and thousands of employees, of which something like 90% are in customer support. Which explains a lot. I've seen really bad customer support from other providers, too. The larger they are, the worse the customer support. Especially the cable companies. I'm actually visiting my parents right now, and they're on TW RR. I was noticing some problems this past week accessing this site among others, and figured it was just their normal BS. I didn't even bother to call customer support. I'm also testing TW RR at home. I do get 3-4Mbps download speeds, while DSL can't get much over 1Mbps. So far, I haven't had much in the way of service problems with SBC or TW, but I know all too well the history of cable companies and their lack of commitment to customer service. I'm hoping to convince SBC to add a repeater on my line so that I can get higher-speed DSL service, closer to what I can get today with my cable modem.

i worked as a network analyst for alltel wireline for about a year (now they're windstream communications or something). anyhoot, the problems that we had about network outages/issues/etc. were never directly relayed to our call desk. we had the same issues as droppedd (see post above). we were required to do the best we could with absolutely no information about what was going on with the network. i think it boiled down to poor management, lousy training, saving money, and, um, completely incompetent employees.

My experience with RR Socal (I live in Huntington Beach) has been different. Every time they suspected hardware, it was never mine, and they would send out a guy to swap out the units, be it my cable modem, dv-r, whatever, even if it was "just in case", or if they changed models, etc.. I'm one of their all-in-one customers, however. I wonder if this makes a difference, but it shouldn't.

I live in the RR Midwest region and have had really unreliable service lately. It was great 2-3 years ago, but now I have problems weekly...and my speeds....awful!

It's how tech support always works. It's never their fault if they can't fix it. Same as if two companies such as h/w s/w are involved in a problem where either will be the cause, they always blame each other. It's what's easiest. I would think all geeks would know this by now.

I live in Kansas. Not the B.F.E. part. Just outside of KC. The TW RR Group out here, last I heard was getting ready for the merger with Crapcast. This tech told me a while back that Comcast was buying them out and we were getting upgraded from 4Mbps to 6Mbps, but he didn't have any idea as to when it was gonna happen. I also don't know the validity of his statements either as TW is a very big player in the game. They haven't been to bad out here, just typical 3 day wait if you need service, whine and complain and you will get credits posted to your account. Oh, and TW RR doesn't list their newsgroup stuff on their website, you have to contact TECH Support for that info.

I've been having no end of problems with RR the last couple of days. Most traceroutes I do seem to have serious hiccups somewhere over in Level3's network. Sadly, here in the midsouth.rr.com area, the nameservers we're configured to use are in the columbus.rr.com area, and packets from midsouth.rr.com are routed through Level3's network over to columbus.rr.com -- for whatever bizarre reason, we don't have local nameservers over here, and the packets are going across the public Internet to get from one branch of RR's network to another branch of their network. Bizarre. Truly bizarre. I guess now we know why more and more people are going with dual-WAN and multi-WAN routers, because there just aren't any good ISPs any more.

I know that they are doing this as a friend of mine used to work at a helpdesk for a dutch ISP. Whenever it got too complicated they got the instruction to just blame it on the user's soft- and/or hardware. ISP's suck and the internet should be offered by a country's government!

ISP's should realize that we can exclude the problem from "our-side" of the puzzle within a few minutes. 1)Check cabling and power for disconnects 2)Has anything changed 3)Ping 127.0.0.1 - TCP/IP works 4)Ping another PC on network - NIC works (further rules out cabling) 5)Ping router - rules out router, several other issues. 6)Check modem for activity. 7)Their problem. BTW - gigamike, I agree with you on those Toshiba modems. Trojan, I though you were giving us a play-by-play of your current service call status

WideOpen West had a local outage last Thursday and the CSR tried to blame it on my router. I attributed it to incompetence, but it could have been an intentional diversion. I'm not sure if I believe she was that competent though.

I have worked for multiple ISP's in tech support including roadrunner. It is standard policy to inform if there is an outage in the area. You have to understand tech support agents are usually over qualified, but dumbed down to keep trouble shooting simple, and have call time goals they have to meet. The reason for multiple tiers esp in the Road Runner case, is that Time Warner Cable uses their network for other ISP including Earthlink, AOL, and others, you have to be sent to the correct place. And believe it or not some people don't pay their bills, and those issues result in a disconnect, which need to be resolved at the billing level, so they weed out the issues. Also many companies do outsource low and mid level support. By the time you reach level 3 at most companies you are with an actual employee. Many busy ISP tech support agents deal with around 50+ calls a day, of people who are technical novices, it does frustrate people, and if you get the agent at the end of his shift, agents are human too. I can tell you this, the nice guys get more then the ones that scream. The ones that scream ruin people's days, and at that point the agent just wants them off the phone. Roadrunner is one of the better tech supports I have worked for, especially since their agents deal with so much. I can say the problem is usually a modem or line quality issue (noise on the lines / SNR) something that affects dial up and DSL. And people spill everything on modems, have animals chew through cords etc. The PCX1100, is noted at RR as a must replace modem. Also many times it is the customer equipment, it can be the pc (virus or winsock or etc), router, misconfigured firewalls (Norton IS, Mcafee Security Center) usually rebooting the modem then the router will fix most things, just don't expect any ISP support agent to troubleshoot another companies router. It is like taking your chevy to a ford dealer for warranty work, what you can request is to direct connect to the modem, to see if there is a problem with the service. Understand any tech support agent has to deal with great people and the meanest of the mean everyday, and everyones problem is different, cut them some slack, be nice, and it will get fixed. Also remember reboot your equipment before calling, Modems, routers and pc's, they all hang at some point.

Big assed jew controlled corporations always have the dumbest least accountable person be customer-facing. You have to really fucking break roadrunner's balls to get to talk to a systems engineer and really break his balls to get him to actually review an issue. After about 4 hours on the phone, you may actually have a phone call with support in progress.
The most common fuckup they do is altering the dns servers- try flushing your dns and re-registering see if that helps.