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.

My RR experience was better

[Chang]

I'm using RR in the Northeast Ohio area and a few weeks ago the machine that hosts the personal pages died for some reason or another.

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

[mrzaph0d]

if you do manage to get the name of someone important to send it to, sometimes it's good to send it as a registered letter, giving you proof it was delivered...

"Leave the gun, take the canoli."

Look For Open Shop

[SEWilco]

Look for an ISP with a live "status" web page that shows the status of their network. If they're willing to show that they're OK or not then they probably care about fixing things quickly.

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.

[Zan Thrax]

@home gave me a 2 month credit about a year ago when I lived in Calgary because I was vocal about my dissatisfaction with the frequent outages (at least twice a day, multiple hours each time, for a period of about three weeks). It didn't change anything about their service, and I doubt that anyone I've been complaining to lately about their Vancouver router always being down lately (which either slows to a crawl, or completely disrupts my connection) have any idea that I've ever had problems with them before...

Re:My RR experience was better

[oxygenated]

I have had RR since December and had quite varied experiences. Within two weeks installation it was down for four days. A month later, they 'accidentally' deleted my account. When I called them about it, the tech told me that he could not help me because I was using Microsoft Outlook instead of Outlook Express, when ANY pop3 program would work and I had checked my email earlier that day. The tech was so insistent that Outlook Express was the only thing that would work, I ended up hanging up only to call back and lie. This alone warrants 'bad service' instead of improving, the service currently goes down for five hours every few days, usually in the early morning hours and every time they attempt an "upgrade", the service is down for at least 2 days. At one point, the passwords database to all accounts was revealed to the public and at about the same time they "lost" my modem's MAC address. This really makes you wonder what sort of service they are running!?

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.

[Spoing]

They passed him on to the president? That's amazing. I usually have to go to the SEC's list of corporate filings [sec.gov] that include the names of company executives. These are for public, stock, corporations. For private companies, I'd have to dig deeper.

MTTR for ISPs

[iamabot]

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.

[billcopc]

The problem is that you have no way of knowing if it really is the president. Quite often the first line techs will simply relay you to a 2nd liner who will pose as the prez (or whomever you're asking for).

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

[Sasha-of-Penguin-Inc]

While you're certainly entitled to some quality of service, given the monthly fees for broadband service, the lesson I've learned is that you should never host your webpage on your ISP's webservers anyway. Either quota is too small, limited content support, or otherwise. You should be able to depend on your ISP for net service, but I don't think they make a perogative of rigid maintenance on their webservers. If I was a RoadRunner marketing person, I certainly wouldn't assume the personal web page hosting part to be anything more than a mere enticement.

figures, cable isp's are the worst

[mikus]

i worked for @home for a year in their techsupport and finally got sick of having to tell our customers lies and bs as per their scripts. Then i went to work at another small cable isp, "ispchannel". Same crap there. The isp side of it all is held hostage to the cable companies when it comes to degrading performance, but stuff like webspace and what-not is entirely up to the isp. If they won't act, it's probably out of laziness or incompetence if they are anything like the ones at @home. Most of them were incompetent, promoted only out of department clearing-house budgeting. The only thing you can do is keep pushing and always ask to speak to a supervisor. Either that or go down to your local MSO (cable company) and raise utter hell with them. They will certainly pass the buck to the isp!

RoadRunner Sucks

[ksheff]

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.

[Zurk]

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.

Sympathies. Open access on cable necessary

[satch89450]

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.

[einstein]

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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Real life paper

[Matt_Bennett]

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.

ISP Technician Dedication

[Hyperbolix]

I am a helpdesk technician for a local Internet Service provider. Just a few weeks ago, our main backbone connection to the internet, a T3, went down. We fell back on our secondary connection, a T1. For those who are "T"-challenged, a T1 is not 1/3rd of a T3. It is about 30 times smaller. Being a helpdesk tech., I could swear I had explained the situation to every one of our 9000 customers. The affair took a whole 36 hours to resolve, and ended up being the fault of upstream provider. Once the line came back up, the huge flood of inbound e-mail that couldn't get through during the bandwidth problem took down our Mail server. This, in turn, killed the Shell server, as the two are highly interdependent. All the problem were resolved within about 72 hours of the line problem. The reason this was solved in a relatively quick time, is because of our highly dedicated systems technicians. One of our systems technicians, thanks to large quantaties of caffeine from Think Geek [thinkgeek.com], awoke at 6:00 the morning of the problem, and did not go to sleep until 10:30 the next day. He spend the entire time working on the problem.

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?