 Review by EGeezer 
UPDATED: 56 days ago
member for 5.9 years, 2780 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Mount Sterling,Madison,OH
 $45 per month
 about 14 days
 "Speed, reliability, up time"
 "ISP blacklist removal takes over 10 days"
 "Poor suport, long phone wait times, no escalation for unresolved problems"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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REVIEWED (SEE 31 MAY UPDATE at bottom)
Time Warner Road Runner ( NOT Earthlink Insight or other sub-brand )
BACKGROUND
Time Warner purchased Heartland cable, a small regional company that had frequent (monthly) significant outages of TV cable of more than two hours.
HISTORY
Over the past four years, TW upgraded the cable service, added internet and has been good with consistently improved uptime and signal quality. Internet connection was initially at around 750 kb down, 128 kb up. This has incrementally improved to where speed (see ZIP 43143 reports) shows around 2.8 - 3 Mbps down, around 380 - 400 kbps up. The advertised upgrade to 5 Mbps made no difference in download speeds in my area. Download speeds are still 2.8 to 3.0 Mbps. However, upload speeds have improved to 420 to 510 kbps, which bodes well for my planned move to VoIP.
NOTE: Download speed limit could possibly be a limitation of the router I have behind the modem. I will update when I can test without a router in the configuration.
UPTIME
Last outage was when we lost power over a four mile or so area for about an hour. My UPS with PC, router and cable box was up but the cable light was off, so the connection was down. Connection came back with the power. I've had a couple of outages over the past six months, under a half hour in duration. We had one "maintenance" outage for about 40 minutes back in March 2005. Up time has been better than my Spring local Phone service.
INSTALLATION
Prior to installation, I had laid out stakes where the cable was to be run and buried. They apparently ignored it because a couple of years later I cut it with a tiller in a place several feet from the designated path. They fixed the cable next business day and reburied the cable a couple of weeks later under my direct supervision. The rest of the installation went smoothly with no technical issues or performance problems. I was up and running within a half hour of the modem cable being connected to the PC. Present modem is a Surfboard SB4200. I had three 5200s (or whatever the black modems are) go dead on me and they finally gave me a 4200 which has not failed.
SUPPORT AND SERVICE - SEE 31 MAY UPDATE - this paragraph is what Road Runner USED to have -
Help desk support WAS usually good and infrequently needed. Time to a call taker is 20-25 minutes hold time. On site appointments were kept as promised, within a four hour block. Compared to Ameritech's DSL phone support, Road Runner's is no longer superior in quality and response time and RR's techs were script readers with little understanding or ability to perform any analysis.
When someone dug up and broke a cable to my house in 2006, Time Warner replaced all the cable clear into my house, installing new grounding and lightning arrestors.
PRESALES
Their business pre-sales is not what I'd prefer. When I asked about ISP without bells and whistles where we provided our own router, firewall and VPN endpoints they insisted we had to use their rather expensive equipment and did not want to provide us with connection and relatively inexpensive interface. Pre-sales is light on technical specs.
DIALUP/ROAMING
Road Runner also has a dialup as part of the service for roaming users. The dialer is a proprietary one with what appears to be PPPOE authentication. It is a slow loader and on an older machine loads slowly. There are lots of local dial numbers for larger cities. Connection speeds were from 26000 bps in Reston VA to 44000 bps in Chicago.
EDIT - SEE 31 MAY UPDATE for webmail client.
The addition of a web based mail client is a plus. I can now check email from other systems. The webmail connection is SSL and encrypted at logon only. SSL disappears when reading mail, so the session after login is not encrypted.
ANTIVIRUS
I believe they use Ironport to filter email to the RR.COM accounts and that has been useful even though I have AV on my systems. Viruses are removed from incoming mail items and a message is attached to the email detailing the item removed.
SPAM FILTERING - SEE 31 MAY UPDATE
EMAIL
Over six years I have had seven blacklisting problems - two instances of our MX being blacklisted by MSN webTV, three by CLOVER.NET. All issues resolved within ten days, during which I used a Yahoo account to communicate. As of 31 MAY 2008 it's been around two weeks since i had a blacklisting issue with senders' emails being blocked.
BILLING
I have had no billing issues. When Sprint offered a quite attractive DSL service package in my area two years ago, RR dropped the price for a period as an incentive to stay.
IN SUMMATION - SEE MAY 19 2008 UPDATE -
Over all, competitive but widely varying speeds, good uptime, poor service. I'd pay more for good service and quality product, as opposed to cheap service, low quality, poor help desk and support. I'm starting to look at competitive offerings.
Update - Getting consistent upload speed of 492Kbps. Download speeds from 2800 to 4700 Kbps, depending on time of day and PC I use to test. I have Modem, router, ATT CV TA and phone on a 1.5 KVA UPS, service stays up when power goes out. Had to reboot cable modem once in the last several months. other than that, rock solid.
Price is 45 per month now.
12 DEC 2007
Speeds running about 495 up, 6000 down. Reliability still good. I experienced some delays in receiving mail after their mail upgrade, but that smoothed out.
RR didn't tell me that they were implementing a spam filter, and a few legit emails were missing. I had to log into webmail to find them in the spam folder. After a chat session with a clueless tech rep who couldn't understand the words "retrieve contents of junk mail folder using my pop3 client", I resubmitted the problem to a different tech and discovered I will need to log into web mail to view emails trapped as spam.
I don't think the chat support is very good. I've had the "clueless" experience once before, so they're batting .333, not good for a tech support function.
SEE 31 MAY UPDATE
However, the filter seems to work pretty well and the network performance is very good.
UPDATE 31 MAY 2008
Road Runner's once excellent service has degraded to long wait times, script reading call takers with little ability to understand or resolve any but the most basic problems. I've made three calls on still unresolved issues with the web mail spam filters and issues with spam emails with malformed headers making it into my inbox while emails from contacts and allowed senders continues to be placed in the spam folder. One call was supposedly to level 2 support. None of them seemed familiar with the webmail interface or what the various options did. The calls totaled close to three hours on the phone, all but about fifteen minutes on hold. A call to the sales office got me to a guy who was very nice but had no contacts for escalation of the issue. As a webmail service, Road Runner's interface, function and spam filtering capabilities is significantly inferior to that of the Yahoo-based service provided by ATT.
Even though they cost more than their competitors, I purchased and kept Road Runner because they had better service and support. That is no longer the case and their value add for price is drastically reduced in my experience.
At this point I am advising potential ISP customers to consider other providers and not consider their support to be competitive.
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