Brickblog

Warning: Angry Rant follows

This Thanksgiving, we finally moved my parents on to a ‘high-speed’ cable connection. The only option available in Maine is Time-Warner, which uses Roadrunner (rr.com).

Now for a long time, I always thought that Comcast was a miserable company to deal with, at times with questionable practices. I was wrong, or rather, Comcast turns out could be worse.

The night before Thanksgiving, the self install kit arrived. With excitement, my brother and I planned on setting up Dad’s brand new Shiny Dell to get online the following day, when we could break away from dinner prep. Now my brother Tom, had called to get the self-install kit, and was led to believe that a cable modem would be included. No such luck. So with a quick drive to Brunswick, we pick up the only cable modem available at staples. Thursday morning, I go into the office with the kit, pop in the cd to set up Dad’s computer. What followed was absolutely baffling. All the CD did was bring up the MAC Address of the cable modem we had purchased the night before, and gave me a non 800, long-distance number to call.

With growing frustration, I proceed to call the number, where I navigate too many menu choices to remember, and sit on hold. To add insult to injury, during the 40 or so minutes of sitting on hold, I was reminded by the annoyingly friendly voice on the phone, that I should sign up for Road Runner High speed Internet service. ARGH!

Just about the time, I had thought about giving up, I finally got a hold of a human, maybe. My RR associate took my MAC address and told me that he would submit the work order to MIS to activate the modem, and that it could take up to an hour. I asked him if I could get some confirmation number to reference if I needed to call back. . . “Sorry, I don’t have anything to give you” was the reply. “O.k., whats your name?” I ask. I get his name and write it down, at which point he realizes he can give me the ticket # from submitting the work-order to MIS. I take the number, and we say our good days.

Now, to their credit, and the only positive experience with this two-bit hack service provider, in 30 minutes, we’re up and running on the interWeb on the Computer machine. We get a call from the associate that I spoke with earlier. Signal quality on all 3 measurements for the modem are in the red. I immediately assume it’s the internal wiring for the house. In case however, we schedule a service appointment.

Later that day, we decide that it doesn’t make sense to have a tech come out until we rewire the house with RG-6, so I get back on the phone to cancel the appointment. . . 25 minutes later I give up and hang up to go see family that came to say hi.

Now here we are The following Tuesday, and my brother is working from home and tries to cancel the appointment. He found email contacts on the RR site, and sends an email to the two addresses listed explaining we would like to cancel the appointment. Great, we should be set, right? No both address, which he got from the site remember, fail. 34 minutes of hold music that as he put it “will put a caffeine addict to sleep!” he finally got a human.

All of this for their high speed connection, which by the way is 256k Up/256k down. Yeah, you read that right. WTF?!

From my understanding from friends that have had this service for some time, Time Warner cut the speed of basic service to this speed, then turned around and offered the original speed as a premium service, for more.

This folks, is today’s Qual-i-Tee award winner.