Fun and games with Time Warner Cable
February 7, 2010 at 10:18 am
Our cablemodem has been crapping out on us periodically. It would just stop working and we’d have to unplug its power and plug it back in to get it running again. This didn’t happen very often so it wasn’t an urgent matter. Yesterday, I had to run errands in Durham anyay, so I took the cablemodem with me and swapped it for a “new” one at the Durham Time Warner Cable office. Of course, “new” doesn’t mean new. It really means “another one”.
I plugged in the replacement modem and it didn’t work; it couldn’t lock onto the cable signal. Of course, the TWC office was closed by the time I realized I had a bad modem. I went through two levels of local support and two levels of national RoadRunner support on the phone before they decided to send a tech out. Fortunately, I got me an appointment between 9AM and 11AM today. I thought I’d be offline until Monday morning.
The tech called me at 8:20AM this morning, arrived at 8:35AM, checked the signal on the cable, and then replaced the “new” modem with another which immediately came online. He spent more time outside getting the replacement modem than in my apartment.
Gotta love TWC for giving me a bad modem after the customer service rep in the office bragged that they always test their equipment before giving it out. Shame on them.
We like our digital antennas, one pointing north and the other south. Living between Milwaukee and Chicago, we have access to four PBS channels, and each one of those has three or more sub-channels. We get the major networks and lots of other channels too. We don’t get the channels available only on cable or dish, but don’t consider that too much of a sacrifice. In the eight months we’ve had this arrangement, we have not experienced any weather related disruptions.
Digital antennas aren’t going to get me online any time soon.
I’ve actually been pleased with my TWC service since I moved to Hillsborough. The signal is good and the only time (until now) I’ve had problems was when an apartment complex employee went into the main cable distribution box and swapped my apartments feed onto a splitter improperly.
If I didn’t need high-speed internet I’d think about dropping TWC, but since its really the only game in my area, I’m stuck.