Great. Thanks for the help. That's the generic customer support line. *facedesk*

Wincy Orlando: Hello! Thank you for choosing Road Runner Internet technical Chat. My name is Wincy O. How may I assist you?
Sean: Hi, I've been having some connectivity issues over the past couple weeks. Is there anything you can tell me about the reported outages on the network status page?
Wincy Orlando: I'm more than happy to assist you. To get us started, I'm going to need to verify some security information and then we can move on to understanding your issue. We will need to perform some troubleshooting steps together, and I'll be running some tests on my end. Feel free to ask questions along the way.
Wincy Orlando: May I have the following four pieces of information from you please inorder to bring up your account?
1. The account holder's 10 digit telephone number. (xxx-xxx-xxxx)
2. The account holder's Full Name (First and Last)
3. Please tell us your name.
4. Your preferred e-mail address?
(Preferred e-mail address is the one that you use frequently; it may be different from the Road Runner e-mail address)
Sean: **stuff**
Wincy Orlando: Thank you for the information, Sean.
Wincy Orlando: Could you please elaborate the issue?
Sean: For the past few weeks I've been getting dropped connections, some hosts unreachable, and generally shoddy service. I did my own investigating and it seems that my computer will occasionally lose the ability to contact the default gateway.
Wincy Orlando: Okay.
Sean: This is in addition to three outages on the network status site, one of which has been there since May 8th
Wincy Orlando: Isee.
Wincy Orlando: If I understand you are experiencing intermittent connectivity, am I correct?
Wincy Orlando: I am awaiting for your response.
Sean: More or less, yes. I'm usually connected fine, but every few minutes all my connections will hang and some will disconnect.
Wincy Orlando: Alright.
Wincy Orlando: Please allow me couple of minutes to research the issue further.
Wincy Orlando: I appreciate your patience.
Wincy Orlando: I have checked our records and it seems there is an issue with the connectivity.
Sean: That's apparent
Wincy Orlando: This needs to be addressed by our other department at this number
Sean: Sorry, what number?
Wincy Orlando: Just give me a minute.
Wincy Orlando: 207-253-2222 as they have the required tools and expertise to help you resolve the issue.
Wincy Orlando: This is the ticket number for this chat session RQST00056863397.
Wincy Orlando: Is there anything else I may assist you with?
Sean: Nope. Thanks for your time.
Wincy Orlando: You are welcome.
Wincy Orlando: For further assistance please logon to our website http://www.help.rr.com and check for online FAQs.
Wincy Orlando: I would appreciate if you could provide us with your valuable feedback on the support experience after the end of this chat session. It will help us to serve you better. Please submit your comments at http://surveys.rr.com/chat.
Wincy Orlando: Thank you for visiting Road Runner Internet Technical Chat. Have a good day!
Wincy Orlando: Analyst has closed chat and left the room

And what the crap kind of name is Wincy Orlando?

"Fuck Roadrunner"

...Agreed.

Now, my own "I hate them" story:

I've been noticing over the past couple weeks that people are signing on and off rather randomly from AIM, even when they are obviously away from their computer (James for one). I've also been intermittently losing connectivity over my wireless network, which produces the same disconnect and reconnect that I'm observing with other people. I can only assume that this problem is with Time Warner, not my own network, if everyone is seeing it.

Over the winter, I had some major outages which were, well, rather annoying. Since I depend on Time Warner for internet, phone, and TV, it was kinda annoying when I lost all three for days at a time, multiple times a month.
For the first couple service visits to my house, Time Warner tried to pin the blame on user error. (I overheard a technician talking to his supervisor, rather blatantly accusing me of "probably flooding his connection with illegal downloads and porn, it's not our problem")
After the third outage, I noticed that it was always happening at night when the outside temperature was dropping below zero. When I pointed this out to the next technician, she checked to make sure that there wasn't water in the line freezing, found nothing, and went back to blaming it on user error.
Fourth technician, I told the same thing. He seemed to recall that there is a device on the pole outside that works only under a set temperature range...but he couldn't do anything about it.
Fifth visit (after probably 10 outages) finally got someone to climb the pole and find that someone really had screwed up with my house's hardwiring from the pole, and actually fixed that problem.

Now that my house works fine, I just have to deal with Time Warner's normal pain in the ass random disconnections and all...

How I love Roadrunner...

Not to mention how painfully slow everything is when the connection /is/ working. For example, right now I am downloading perl. That is the only network activity save for the occasional HTTP request. I am getting about 4kb/s.

And take a look at their network status page for the Time Warner Cable of Maine region. I haven't seen it without outages for months.

Information is unavailable at this time

We are sorry, but your request cannot be completed. Please try again at a later time.

^^^ That's what happened when I tried the network status page

I am a road-runner tech working tirelessly towards working to resolve customer issues. I understand that customers may be fruatrated because of the issue that they are experiencing, however we are bound by certain policies and protocols that we have to follow at any costs. We can't go ahead and help you with issues not supported in our boundaries cause we may loose our job or a part of our salary. We transfer or refer you necause we want to resolve your issue if not by us, then by the other department.

Mr. Anonymous you do indeed have a very valid point, and I think it's important that people realize that any trouble they may be experiencing is not the fault of the employee on the other end of the line. Unfortunately the people who deserve your strong words are the ones you won't reach over the phone.

I apologize for directing my frustration at the support representatives. I am still frustrated with many of my experiences with roadrunner technical support, but having worked in a corporate environment myself I can understand how such procedures would be developed, and I imagine it is frequently just as frustrating for the techs. Process control can be a pain.

Must be a pretty bad experience on RR chat. I work here and drive is constantly on to ensure that there is a good customer experience.
I hope things have improved over the past 3 months.
Should you still face any issues, please udpate this space.
Due to restrictions (which you are well aware of), i'll be unable to provide any of my contact details.
However, I promise to keep visiting this page to get a direct feedback.

I appreciate your time with this, and am pleasantly surprised by the attention from RR customer service. I'll try to be friendlier with voicing my issues in the future. Thanks for your time.

roflroflroflrofrlfolrfolroflroflrfolfrorfolrfolrfol

Meltdown - thanks for being nice.

I'm back exactly after a week and shall continue to be as punctual as possible (provided I don't go on vacation ;) )

In the meanwhile do you know of any other forums where people voice their opinions about RR/customer/tech support.

I've looked up quite a few but not any common forum/database.

Thanks

Not offhand, sorry. I'd expect that such posts would show up in the off-topic sections of whatever forum a person happens to visit frequently. I'd be surprised if there were a forum dedicated to talking about RoadRunner.

Edit: While I'm here, though, I'd like to bring up a topic that's concerned me for awhile. Slashdot has reported a few times about trials that various ISPs are doing regarding bandwidth caps. Does Roadrunner have any plans to cap monthly bandwidth for it's customers? This would be a personal reason for me to search for another ISP.

And on a related note, the other big issue I have is with some major ISPs (Comcast is the one I hear about a lot) throttling BitTorrent traffic. It would be my hope that administrators of an ISP would know enough about internet protocols to understand that BitTorrent is not the problem with internet piracy, and is used for numerous legitimate purposes, such as distribution of Linux ISOs, and that throttling BitTorrent traffic will only get in the way of legitimate uses, while pirates circumvent the ISP's filters anyway.

Sure,

let me take this one by one.

1. Bandwidth caps: Ideally, if any such move is taken on a corporate level (that affects customers), the tech support would be made aware of the same. I haven't heard of any such information yet. Honestly, I'd rather double check but my thought says NO.. there is no such throttling happening (unless ofcourse, I've missed an update). Maybe they have different priceplans in place but thats the billing department. I wouldn't be aware about it. You can try the billing chat.

2. I do not think there is any block on bittorrent. Ideally, its all on your ports that you choose. Hint: If bittorrent doesn't work for you to download legitimate Software, some other client will. You can Google it up.

Give me some time, I'll come back on point 1 a little later. Hopefully today.

the problem is that bittorrent is by far superior to any other means available for retrieving very large files, .iso's especially. One might say "well since it's already the fastest, what are you complaining about?" I would be complaining about the limiting of one of the great achievements of information technology for no reason other than it makes the ISP look like it's doing something to stop piracy. However I have also heard that torrenting accounts for such a high percentage of total bandwidth that ISP's throttle it down to grant extra speed to more common uses. I can't back this up with any sources, however.

I have a problem with any ISP that tries to tell me how to use the Internet connection that I am paying for. I know people from other regions who have been forced to downgrade to DSL. For their uses, it was technically an upgrade, due to the throttling placed on torrents and UDP traffic by their cable ISP. (their uses primarily involved torrents and online gaming). This is akin to the power utility telling me that my oven isn't allowed to draw so many amps because microwaves are more important.

+1 Dragrag. When I pay an ISP for it's service, I expect to be receiving the full advertised capability, not just the little bits of it that the company determines aren't "high-bandwidth applications".

In the interest of keeping this on topic, though, thanks for your reply. I'm glad to hear that Roadrunner hasn't jumped on this bandwagon, and I hope it won't. (Could be a good advertising point right there, highlighting the fact that you don't throttle or filter.)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v433/IGottaRailgun/networkstatus.jpg

Today's date is 12/02/08. Note the dates on that page. What the heck?