When Does An ISP's Response Time Become Too Slow? 16
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.
My RR experience was better (Score:1)
It took them a few hours to restore, but they had it back online same day. They even took a few minutes to throw up a page explaining the problem for people who tried to hit the server.
Generally, I won't call RR tech support for anything other than my modem being down becuase the support is so pathetic, but I thought they did a decent job on this one.
Re:Real life paper (Score:1)
"Leave the gun, take the canoli."
Look For Open Shop (Score:1)
There are plenty of tools out there. It's trivial to run Big Brother, SPong, Mon, or one of the other public packages that shows and reports device status on a web page. And it also lets the customers take a look and see if there are known problems before they phone Tech Support, particularly if the Status page includes announcements from Tech Support about known problems. (Assuming, of course, that the problem is not that the Status web server is down or the network link to it is dead...)
Re:beat em up. (Score:1)
Re:My RR experience was better (Score:1)
When signing up for RR, I was informed that there was "very little" downtime and that any downtime would be prorated from my bill. I am waiting for my check... All these wrongs would almost be forgiven if simply they were making an *effort* to improve. Service continues to worsen; DNS servers are flaky and packet loss is incredible. Even with the history of their horrible jobs at upgrading, users are still not notified before the fact of upgrades, it is usually a day or two after the 'upgrade' happens. Did I mention that you can't send an email over 5k?
After reading other's problems with RR, I am starting a log of all my problems with them and evidence. With the portion of my bill (remember that pro-rating statement?!), I will enclose a nice 'present' for all of those techies that say RR has few problems.
Most of you are probably asking why I stay with RR, and I have a concession. When it works, RR is blazing fast. You just can't get a 1.5mps (I have done it) downstream on dialup. And one of the many times I have called, I spoke to a real techie who knew what he was talking about. Finally, the biggest reason I stay with RR, I enjoy a challenge (NOT!).
Re:Go to the top. (Score:1)
MTTR for ISPs (Score:1)
A word of advice to you ISP shoppers out there. Find out if your ISP has an MTTR like the telephone companies do. Mean Time To Repair should be a part of the service contract for any tier 1 ISP. You should look for a MTTR of about 12 hours for server outages. For account maintenance surung normal business hours the MTTR should be 1 hour. Your service may vary, but getting an MTTR commitment from the ISP means you can hold them to the contract just as much as they hold you to it.
./bot
Re:Go to the top. (Score:1)
This can be a very good thing, mainly because the upper management usually has nothing to do with the actual business itself. They don't know what's going on, they just sit at meetings tossing buzzwords around. CEO's are CEO's for a reason : they're the ones who keep all the staff managers under control. They don't have the time or talent to deal with customers on the phone (unless those customers have a 7-digit bank balance).
ISP webpage hosting (Score:1)
figures, cable isp's are the worst (Score:1)
RoadRunner Sucks (Score:2)
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.
beat em up. (Score:2)
Sympathies. Open access on cable necessary (Score:2)
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.
Go to the top. (Score:3)
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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Real life paper (Score:3)
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.
ISP Technician Dedication (Score:3)
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.
-- pi ~ 3. 14159265 35897932 38462643 38327950 28841971 69399375 10582097 49445923 07816406 28620899 86280348 25342117 0679
WHAT? YOU THINK I'M OBSESSED?