Author: admin

I’ve generally been a fan of TimeWarner / RoadRunner.  It’s always been a good value for speed/performance vs. Price paid.   In the past they’ve always seemed to be better service wise than say Zoomtown.

Now bear in mind, we kind of live out in the sticks in never land Trenton, OH, in between Middletuckey and Hamiltuckey.

When we moved out there (10 years ago), RR wasn’t an option, nor was Zoomtown, so we survived with Dual ISDN, which wasn’t cheap, but got the job done.

About 6 years ago, RR became available when TimeWarner purchased out local cable provider.   We’ve had reasonable service since, er at least uptill last year or so.  

We’re out in a pretty flat area, and lighting strikes near us are not uncommon.  We’ve gone through four or five cable modems in the last 2 years.

In the last 6 months it’s gotten pretty bad.   Our cable, specifically our RR was very intermittent.  The proverbial crap hit the fan around the 12th of this month when our RoadRunner went out again.

A call to tech support yielded the standard troubleshooting that we always do before we call them.  Reboot the router, unplug and reset the modem, etc, all to no avail.

Of course they couldn’t get a tech out for a couple days (like 3).   So we again played TimeWarner Courier and swapped out our cable modem.  But this cable modem couldn’t be provisioned.  They couldn’t even see it.

So we accepted the appointment for 3 days later. 

Later that evening, it magically started working.  (hurray!).  When they called two days later to verify our appointment, nothing was wrong, so we canceled.

Less than 48 hours later, it rained like hell and guess what?  Our Roadrunner quit working.  “ding ding ding”…   Houston we have a problem.  So we called tech support, repeated all the troubleshooting steps, tried like hell to explain to them that; hey, when it rains our road runner stops working but no one would listen.

We accepted the appointment for 3 days down the road.  Magically less than 24 hours later, things dried up (or more likely froze) and viola, we had working Road Runner.  But we decided to keep the appointment.  We were told that 3-4 days is pretty standard, if we needed faster service than that we should have RoadRunner Business which is same-day service.

So, I ordered that, what the heck, it’s faster and gives me a static IP.  Paying an extra $30 a month seems like a lot but when you consider all the BS we have to go through every time we call, that is money well spent in my opinion.

While waiting for the appointment on the 19th it became more clear that the wetter it is outside, the worse our roadrunner (and cable) service was.

When the tech finally arrived on the 19th, he declared all of our inside wiring ‘crap’.   He also said the tap on the pole was bad, but he fixed that, and sealed it up with silicone.  He ran a new temporary wire from the pole to our house and said someone would be out to burry a new wire in the next couple days.   Funny though, we still had no service.   I asked him what the deal was.  He said “Your inside wiring is bad and I’m not an inside guy.  I also can’t spend any more time here, when you get the new cable buried your troubles will be over”.  The guys should be here tomorrow, they work on Saturday and Sunday.

Of course the weekend came and went and nobody showed up.  During the week of Christmas we had Road Runner for a few hours here and there when things were dry or frozen.   Which unfortunately wasn’t very often.

On Saturday the 27th the guys finally showed up to burry the cable, and burry it they did.

But when they left, we were in worse shape than before.  Not only no RoadRunner, but not Cable TV either.   Nice…  The cable wire bury guys said they’d get someone out today, but then reneged and said Tuesday was the best they could do.

A call to TimeWarner resulted in yet another appointment, no sooner than Tuesday the 30th, which was the standing appointment for having our inside wiring redone.

On top of that, RoadRunner Business could not be installed while there was a repair order in effect for our address.

We tried, to explain to the folks at RoadRunner, that:

A:  It does NOT rain in our house.   We clearly have a moisture issue, or an issue farther down the line.

B: We at least had cable, until they buried the new cable, now we have nothing.  Rewiring the inside of our house will not fix any of this.

They would not listen, so we waited patiently for Tuesday (today).

Of course the first guy shows up to do what?  Rewire the inside of the house.  We quickly re-diverted him outside.  Check the signal AT the house.

Of course this was bad, so we traced it back to the pole and the tap.  He allegedly re-did the tap and we now had cable, but no RoadRunner.  Those signals were not present at the tap.   He now needed to call a linesman.

The line guy showed up a couple hours later.  What did he fine?  A tap that had been struck by lighting, had water in it and was bad.  He replaced that and we were good to go.   This should have been done two weeks ago, but no…

We now are waiting for our RR business installation.   Which I’m less convinced it worth it.  But if it helps us avoid this two week run-around in the future, it will be money well spent.