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When Does An ISP's Response Time Become Too Slow?
marcop asks: "My ISP is Time Warner's RR service in central New York. I have a personal homepage as part of the service. I have not been able to update my site for the past month since their FTP service is down. All I can get from their tech support line is that "they are working on it". I am rather patient when ISP's have down time, but isn't a month rather ridiculous especially since they are "the nation's premiere online service"? Are other Road Runner customers outside of central NY experiencing this?" A week or two I can understand, but anything beyond that is pushing it. Aside from switching ISPs, is there any way a consumer can get their current ISP to get off their butts and fix the problems? Any ISP with long-term downtimes like this should at least offer daily updates so their customers can keep informed.
I had RoadRunner last year and I do admit it was fast...when it worked, which was only about half the time. Their techs were clueless and had me repeat the same stupid steps (run winipcfg, release all, etc..)that never fixed anything. So much so, I could do so them from memory. To make matters worse, they could never give me a straight answer on why it would stop working. Replacing the modem didn't work, having some guy look at the cable wouldn't fix it. The service was shameful. It would also usually go out Friday night and be out the rest of the weekend, especially if it was a three day weekend. The last straw was when it went out the July 4th weekend and stayed out for 10 days. AOL was more reliable. I gave their modem back and went back to my previous dialup ISP.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Every self respecting ISP puts a QoS guarantee in their contract. bash em HARD with a good lawyer..most of the time a good letter will do it...you should be able to get a refund of your contract based on the breakage of their QoS guarantees. Once an ISP has to refund money, theyre usually very good about future service. i've seen it happen on more than one occasion.
I sympathize with your plight. Having gone through a similar issue with Pacific Bell Internet earlier in the year, I know how frustrating it can be. In short, the service sucked.
My problems were not on cable modem service, but DSL. I was able to locate and strike a deal with a local ISP that was a "DSL partner" to switch the ISP provisioning from PBI to the local ISP.
It is experiences like yours that keeps me working toward ISP equal access on cable. When the ISPs don't have a captive market, they tend to pay attention to maintenance. A monopoly, especially one that doesn't have to answer to anyone except possibly a class-action lawsuit, tends toward cavilier toward the finer stuff. Case in point: the only reason FTP access would be down more than a couple of days is because no one is working on it. I've had FTP servers go down on me, and I was able to bring them back up in hours, not days and not especially a month.
As long as the FCC allows monopoly ISP service for cable modems, we will continue to see complaints like yours.
I had a similar problem about 6 years ago, with a hardware company who will remain nameless (sounds-like the last three letters of FAST). I had a brandname computer who's motherboard died on me. No problem I thought, it's still under warranty, I should have it fixed in no time. well, to make a long story short, I ended up fighting with the warranty department for about 2 weeks getting someone to agree that I actually had a warranty. I finally gave that up to no avail, and considering I was 13 at the time, turned the problem over to my dad. he called information and got the corporate offices of the company. when he got the operator at the companies switch board, he asked for the president, and they patched him through!!! the president of the company was shocked to hear of the horrible treatment we were getting, asked for the names of the people that I had talked to, and had my warranty sorted out in a hour. I had my replacement part and technician at my house the next day.
Moral of the Story: call the big guy(or girl) at the top, he just sits in his office all day waiting for something to happen so he can feel proactive.
you may not get as good a response as I did, but boy did that work well for me.
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I post links to stuff here
If a week has gone by, I'd start complaining- but keep records. In this day and age, email and phone calls don't seem to get people's attention. A good, formal, well written letter will get you very far.
Address the issue clearly, concisely, and accurately without any sort of insult or other denigrating comment. Make sure the letter is specifically addressed to someone, which may take a bit of social engineering on your part- but you'll get better results.
Why? Because it was critical. An FTP server, however, is not as critical. Additionally, with a company such as Time Warner, management is probably too high on its horse to work with the techs and apportion resources appropriately. When something goes wrong here, everyone is effected. And, everyone wants it fixed. We make sure it gets done.
I don't mean to simpathize with Time Warner, but bureaucratic BS probably caused this. To make sure it gets done, I would speak to the highest level person you can, and get an estimate of when it will be fixed, and make sure they are infact working on it. From the perspective of the ISP, thats all the advice I can really give.
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WHAT? YOU THINK I'M OBSESSED?