I'm sick of TWC's shitty service and I want to switch ISPs. I've already checked with Verizon DSL, and apparently they don't service my particular apartment complex. What are my other options?

[Edited on December 18, 2010 at 9:35 PM. Reason : zip 27612]

12/18/2010 9:34:05 PM

AT&T has U-verse in very select portions of Raleigh and Apex, maybe a few other locales in the Triangle by this point.

I think there's another DSL provider out there, but I can't recall the name because I think they're Durham-only.

In general, though, you're locked in. There's word that DOCSIS 3.0 will be deployed early next year and hopefully that'll provide some relief.

12/18/2010 9:36:47 PM

I'm curious if anyone else is having the particular problem I am. At first I thought it was just prime-time congestion because I live in an appartment complex with a high density of service. That was until I start running bandwidth and pingtests.

Normally, all servers will return fairly consistent results. Granted a server in California will generally yield worse results than a closer one but I will tend to get definitively "broadband" speeds and ping times under 600ms to all servers I test to. The line quality test will also generally be an A regardless of the server I chose.

When I start experiencing slowdowns things are much less consistent. Right now for example I am getting a .19 Mbit/s download bandwidth and 2233ms ping time from the server in Wilson; results from MOST servers are similarly bad. The server and greensboro and few select others will still consistently return bandwidth results of between 27 and 30 Mbit/s even though the ping times will vary between 29 ms and 2400 ms. My "line quality" result on most servers is an F while some servers will still consistently return an "A" result with low packet loss, latency, and jitter. On the servers that return an "F" some will simply have high latency but 0 packet loss while others will have both high latency and high packet loss.

This almost seems like bad routing tables on TWC or backbone servers but if it was then I would expect others to be having similar issues.

[EDIT]: Ok now about 3/4 of the Speedtest.net servers disappeared from the map of availible servers when I refreshed their site. I haven't used most of them before but it was hard to miss when the number of stars and pyramids on the east coast went from a shit-ton to about 5 with 0 in North Carolina. Did somebody accidently crush the box they keep the internet in (IT Crowd reference)?

[EDIT again]: Checked out some other message boards and found several instances where people described almost the exact same issue (even mentioning greensboro and wilson servers specifically.) After having a technician spend hours at their houses trying to figure it out they finally received something concrete from their supervisors. Apparently this is a "known issue" in some neighborhoods and is expected to be remedied as they replace the inadequate and overwhelmed hardware - which for those not yet upgraded areas will be mid to late January at the earliest. I'm not sure I really buy that though because "local hubs" as the technicians referred to them when overwhelmed would not result in consistently bad connectivity to some servers and consistently good connectivity to others. That is unless when they are talking about "local" they are talking about local portions of backbone or maybe portions where their own network interfaces with Level3 or some other backbone provider.

[Edited on December 18, 2010 at 10:15 PM. Reason : Blargh]

12/18/2010 9:50:58 PM

Spent a few minutes on the phone with Road Runner Tech support (I live in Apex, NC) and they are having some sort of hardware issue.

This same issue (very slow download speeds:
.19 Mbps download from speedtest.net) happened a couple of Saturdays ago.

[Edited on December 18, 2010 at 10:20 PM. Reason : fixed]

12/18/2010 10:18:17 PM

*sigh* I just realized I had my old desktop configured to use non TWC dns servers. I haven't done that with this one and I'll go ahead and give that a try. This does not seem like a purely DNS related issue though, but I have noticed I am getting more DNS errors than I did with the alternate configuration I had been using.

Yeah as I thought completely unrelated to the odd apparent slowdown of "only" my connection to 3/4 of the internet with no appreciable impact on the remaining 1/4. Knew it was a longshot though. Probably congestion on the TWC side of the network with "local hubs" being a bit less local than the switch responsible for most or part of a neighborhood.

Now that it's a little later in the evening it has been getting slightly better (sites that are slowed now buffer at faster than dialup speeds) but you can still see the inconsistency I'm talking about here:











I did pathpings to the affected servers and noticed that my traffic to those (even those in NC) appears to leave the TWC network at a server in Texas while my traffic to the unaffected sites appears to be leaving the TWC network in Atlanta. This is the one consistent thing I have found so far as geographic location of the target site does not seem to indicate anything on its own.

[Edited on December 18, 2010 at 10:51 PM. Reason : ragefail]

12/18/2010 10:23:31 PM

Quote :

"I'm sick of TWC's shitty service and I want to switch ISPs. I've already checked with Verizon DSL, and apparently they don't service my particular apartment complex. What are my other options?"

If you're in an apartment complex you don't have any other options (other than maybe satellite). Nearly every complex runs their own phone lines, and contracts with a single cable carrier.

12/19/2010 1:45:55 AM

Quote :

"If you're in an apartment complex you don't have any other options (other than maybe satellite). Nearly every complex runs their own phone lines, and contracts with a single cable carrier."

It's not quite so bad if you look at apartment complexes that aren't targeted mostly towards students/first-time renters. But then again if someone is looking for stand-alone internet service without installation $100+ installation then it's not just appartment complexes where they'll find their selection limited.

U-Verse is an option for many local appartment dwellers but unless you want to bundle with at least TV or phone services then you'll end up paying a $100 or more service fee. You can of course bundle and cancel the unwanted extra service but if you do you may pay a downgrade fee if you do it within 30 days. Also, if you bundle you will have a higher monthly rate after cancelling then you would had you not bundled in the first place. This is because when bundling they credit most of the one time equipment fee for the internet service but instead charge you a $2 "rental" fee for it every month in perpetuity. Granted you would have to have the service for nearly 4 years for the one time fee to be worth it - at which point you will likely require a new gateway (serves same purpose as the cable modem) if they go to higher speeds. If you "rent" it then the TOS state that equipment replacement for the purposes of upgrading service speeds is covered. If you get it with the one time fee then they will still replace it as long as you still have service with them but are not automatically entitled to a free replacement with a newer model even if you want to upgrade to a higher speed service not compatible with your current gateway. To be clear though - not entitled does not mean won't get nor does it mean won't get for free.

Under my original TWC terms of service I was not entitled to have my older model Motorola surfboard modem replaced (as long as it still worked) with a newer model that supported the higher speeds and turbo boost when that all rolled out. They still gave one to me for free though - so I wouldn't worry about that part too much.

To make a long ramble short (for god's sake I should have started by doing that)- if you don't get your cable/internet service through your apartment complex it's worth checking to see if you can get U-verse. Despite the difference in max advertised speeds, the actual speeds you will experience while using the internet should be as good with u-verse as they are when road runner is working as it is supposed to - this is because at 12 mbps or 30 mbps it is not likely that your downstream bandwidth is the limiting factor in a transfer or stream rate. Reliability of service and stability of your actual available bandwidth should be better - particularly for those who would describe both of those as awful with TWC. If you can get it where you live and are ok bundling services or can swallow the one-time fee then go ahead and do it.

Of course if you're currently happy with TWC (though the OP is not and I have never met one of these mythical satisfied TWC customers- I concede the possibility that they exist) the fees and bundling issues can make switching undesirable.

12/19/2010 3:36:38 AM

if you're in a raleigh area complex, it's very likely switches on your link are being failed over during a docsis3 upgrade.

12/19/2010 4:32:12 PM

Quote :

"If you're in an apartment complex you don't have any other options (other than maybe satellite). Nearly every complex runs their own phone lines, and contracts with a single cable carrier"

this is wrong.

12/19/2010 5:10:21 PM

^I hope you mean wrong as in morally because in many apartment complexes in Raleigh, that sentence is factually correct.



V ah. Gotcha

[Edited on December 19, 2010 at 8:01 PM. Reason : Meh]

12/19/2010 7:43:48 PM

many != all != most != nearly every

12/19/2010 7:56:25 PM

BUMP....


We don't have TWC down here in Charleston, but it's equivalent is Comcast, and I'm about done with them. The internet service isn't that bad, but I'm not paying $65 a month for high speed internet.

Has anybody used AT&T for high speed internet? I'm going through my options, and they seem to be the cheapest while still being reputable. I'm also looking to get a landline because I'm going to start working more from home and I need to have a separate line for faxes and figure I might as well make it a home office number as well...and I can bundle it with AT&T and also get a good price. So does anyone have experience? They have four options of their Fast Access DSL (from "Extreme 6.0" all the way down to "Lite")...and I'm wondering if there is a significant difference. Since I'm on the internet a lot, I'd like for the internet to be relatively fast, but I'm not going to pay a lot more money for minimal difference.

Stupid question, but I can use the same landline for faxes and phone calls right?

1/25/2011 12:21:01 PM

i'd use at&t in a second if they offered it where i live. not b/c i particularly like at&t (although i have used them for my cell phone for 10 years) but b/c TWC needs to feel some competition

1/25/2011 12:26:10 PM

I'm just wondering if their internet is reliable. I can get a bundled package of high speed internet and a phone line for right around $60 while Comcast is charging me $65 just for high speed internet.

I might try and see if I can get them to go down again (I was paying $35 a month for a new customer deal...even though I wasn't a new customer, I just moved)...but if they can't also offer a cheap phone line, then it's probably not going to happen and I'll have to just go with AT&T anyways.

Was just trying to get some opinions on their internet service.

1/25/2011 12:33:46 PM

i've had at&t dsl at the express level (i think?) for 2+ years now -- haven't had any problems with reliability over that span and no noticeable problems with basic email/web surfing/etc

downloading stuff can be a little slower, though i don't really download large files or anything all that much so it's not really an issue for me

i stream espn3 to my tv with no problems either

don't have a landline though so can't comment on that...

1/25/2011 4:28:05 PM