Time Warner sucks. We've had Roadrunner for about 2 years and it's complete garbage. I've complained for a long time about it, but now I have evidence. First of all, I did 2 download tests to assess the speed of roadrunner. I downloaded an ISO of the new Ubuntu distribution (9.04) over both Bittorrent and http here at home on my Time Warner Roadrunner Cable and at school over the wifi network. At home, I activated the downloads each night at about 11:30 PM when I went to bed and stopped them at about 7 AM when I left for work the following morning. The night of the torrented download, over the whole night, I'd downloaded 46 Mb of the 700, and the night of the http download I'd downloaded 134 Mb. (BTW, could there be some throttling going on here, which they said they don't do? hmm.) That means over bittorrent I'm getting approx. 1.74k/s over torrent and 5.08k/s over http, which is paltry yet typical. We have trouble chatting while streaming video here. From the exact same source on the same laptop at the UNCG wifi network, I got the WHOLE 700Mb file in 6 minutes 28 seconds over torrent and 11 minutes 14 seconds over http, meaning speeds of 1.85Mb/s for torrent and 1.063Mb/s over http! We've even called a tech out to the house, he hooks up his meter, says "looks fine to me, have you considered paying for Turbo?" and leaves. No I'm not paying for fucking turbo, I should be paying for dial-up since it would be a GODDAMNED IMPROVEMENT.

Speed is not the only egregious offense either. For your consideration, I present the following evidence: (click the images for larger versions)

Exhibit A: Thursday, March 26, approx 7:00 PM, www.woot.com goes down. No woot-off, all other traffic works including shirt.woot.com, but woot is down.


Eshibit B: Sunday, March 29, approx 5:30 PM, my website goes down but other traffic is fine. My domain's server logs show no errors and people I chat with can access my site, only I cannot.


Exhibit C: Sunday, March 29, Approx Midnight, fark.com and some of the sub pages become inaccessible. Sites fark linked to are fine.


Exhibit D: Monday, March 30, Approx 9:30 PM, my site goes down again showing the same symptoms as Exhibit B. The site works, I know it.


Exhibit E: Tuesday, March 31, approx 7:15 PM, a single Megaupload page goes down but others don't.

This had been happening extensively around this time, I only took the care to document it a few times. Now, according to Time Warner, they're just innocent helpers. "Hey, we saw you got an error when trying to access this page, here's some things that might help you out while what you're looking for is inconveniently down." However, there's no errors. After that last intercept, I went into the little "Why am I here?" link on that page, where they have an option to "Disable Roadrunner Suggestions." I of course click that, and suddenly, I get no more intercepts. More importantly, I get NO MORE ERROR PAGES EITHER. it's not like all these sites go down for frequent swatches of time as Time Warner would have you think. What was happening is Time Warner randomly intercepts your traffic and sends you to a page full of sponsored links, collecting advertising revenue, until you opt out. This practice is SUPREMELY illegal and a violation of their end of the TOS (not the suggestions but the intercepting of my traffic, though how do you really prove that), yet for 99 of people they wouldn't think of it, they'd think TW/RR was being helpful.

Couple all of this evidence with the Time Warner tiered internet debacle that was going to be tested right here in the North Carolina Triad, and it's pretty clear you have to be an idiot to go with Time Warner for any of your services. I haven't even gotten into the 2 months we had digital cable SOLELY for the purpose of watching MMA Pay Per Views and the system didn't work from day 1, we'd try to order and they wouldn't have events or they were labeled the wrong channel or wrong time and you'd miss them or couldn't pre-order them.

We'd cancel if we weren't moving in a month or if we had a phone line coming to the house to get DSL, but the least we can do is tell you to NEVER GET TIME WARNER OR ROADRUNNER INTERNET.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Geek, Tirades.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.