kib

Don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya…

So after several rounds of the most piss poor, incompetent tech support on the planet, I am telling Time Warner Cable where they can shove it. I don’t entirely blame the level 1 techs that answer the phone because the problem is most likely up at the NOC level, but the lack of transparency is enough to piss me off.

It all started with my personal junk blog being blocked from outside the TWC network. Being a former network engineer and all, I explained to them exactly what was going on – silence. I checked the Network Status page – bleeding red all over. Red signifies unplanned outages. Talked to a few friends who also have TWC and all have been having problems since exactly the same day.

I guess that TWC was attempting some kind of network upgrade or yet another filtering/throttling project and screwed everything up – as usual. I finally had it with their crap service and called AT&T to see what they could do for me. I wasn’t expecting much, but boy was I surprised!

What it boils down to:

  • Internet and Phone Services are $5 cheaper than TWC
  • I have 3 times the Upstream Bandwidth
  • I have slightly less Downstream Bandwidth (but it is dedicated, not ‘up to’)
  • No Contract
  • Oh, and here’s the kicker – I get 8 Static IPs for FREE!

When all is said and done, I will probably get faster downstream downloads because my bandwidth is dedicated, not shared like a cable network. The 8 static IPs are just the icing on the cake, but it does make a huge gesture toward me as a customer. AT&T is practically saying ‘go a head and host whatever you want from your home, we’ll even give you the static IPs to do it.’ The only way TWC could possibly get me back as a customer is if AT&T messed things up so horribly I had to move back. The chances of that, however, are slim to none.

In summary, TWC needs to be more transparent at the very least. At the very most, they need to hire quality techs and network engineers, not some knock offs that went through some cert mill.