Review by pinhead3641 
UPDATED: 203 days ago
member for 5.5 years, 28 visits, last login: 121 days ago
 Placentia,Orange,CA
 $56 per month
 "They seem to be improving in some respects."
 "The connection seems slow during the evening (7:00 p.m. through 9:00 p.m.)"
 "We are trying to extract as much value from this as we can."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update 5/8/2009: TWC has been really slow of late, especially in the evening. I'm not sure if they're being hacked again-- no word from them-- but speed tests this morning were coming in at 3.5-5.5 Mb/sec down and around 1 Mb/sec up.
We are noticing a relatively large number of page load errors, plus there have been email hiccups where my client intermittently fails to connect with the server.
On a somewhat related front, my parents are switching to TWC from Verizon DSL for their Internet connection. Some predecessor company of TWC had cabled their street years ago, and they were cable subscribers until 2001 or 2002. Now the cable is dead for some reason, and TWC has been arranging from crews from local utilities (Telco, Edison, Gas Co., etc.) to come out and mark all their stuff on the street before they dig to fix their cable. I would guess such problems arise on only a small number of installations, but I was thinking to myself that someone is paying for all those utility crews to come out and spray-paint markings on the street. Someone will also be paying for the TWC crew to dig, fix the cable, and patch the street. The process is in its second week now since the original install appointment; I wonder how many thousands of dollars TWC has gone into the red on this pending subscription.
The forums here can also provide you with some idea of how TWC/RR is doing:
»What the heck is going on in SoCal? - Part 2
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Update 4/13/2009: I did a speed test earlier, and found that we're getting about 7.0 Mb/sec down and 0.9 Mb/sec up, which seems about par for the course. The advertised rate for our connection is 10 Mb/Sec down and 1 Mb/sec up, which I have never seen achieved.
A few weeks ago, TWC contacted customers and advised they were being attacked by unnamed hackers, hence the slow speeds we were experiencing back in 2/2009. To their credit, things seem to be back to normal... that is, back to 70-75% of the advertised speeds.
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Originally we were Adelphia customers. My spouse was telecommuting, and the company required a cable modem, so we've been paying somewhere between $54-$57 monthly for the service for about seven years now.
Back in 2006, Adelphia was replaced by TWC, and from our end we didn't really notice any difference. There were little hiccups here and there-- maybe more than we noticed, as my spouse no longer telecommutes-- but it seemed to me that there were fewer problems under TWC than we experienced under Adelphia. The connection did become gradually faster over the years, and the price stayed relatively flat. I have some speed tests archived on this site, so if you care to dig, you can see the numbers for yourself.
[I tested using two different speed tests just a few minutes ago (on a Friday morning) and got download speeds of 6.4Mb/sec and 7.9Mb/sec, and upload speeds of 0.15Mb/sec and 1.5Mb/sec, for whatever that is worth. I rarely do speed tests so long as everything "feels" right.]
I don't really recall TWC asking us what we wanted, but we ended up with their "Turbo" service when they took over our account from Adelphia. At this moment on their Web site, this service is advertised as offering "up to" 10M download speeds and 1M upload speeds, and after YEARS of watching the storage capacity of my gmail account grow until it could hold nearly 300 times as much as my Adelphia/TWC email box, they FINALLY upgraded the email storage space to reasonable levels, so that now my gmail account has a storage capacity that is only about 30 times larger than my email box at TWC.
They've improved their Webmail interface, so I can again check my private email when I'm away from home without having problems with Firefox, my usual browser (for a time, Firefox running on Windows would choke on their Webmail interface), and they have greatly reduced the obscene amount of spam I receive, in comparison to what I used to experience. My email address was ferreted out by spammers years ago, and seems to be well-known at this point, so I really appreciated the invisible (to me) and seemingly aggressive spam fighting. A few years ago, in the bad old days of Adelphia, I was so fed up with the spam that I was on the verge of switching to another ISP.
At this point, my only complaint is that we do see a typical slowing of everything during the evening. We've recently added VOIP for our telephone service-- from Ooma, not TWC-- so we'll see how it all works out. Maybe if I remember I'll come back and update this review in a few months.
Followup comments:  
Anonymous_
Anonymous
Premium
join:2004-06-21
127.0.0.1
clubs: | did not know 7.0 MB/sec down and 0.9 MB/sec
did not know
they offerd 56mbit/8mbit | |
|  | aparis99
join:2006-10-24
Owensboro, KY
| Re: did not know said by Anonymous_ :7.0 MB/sec down and 0.9 MB/sec did not know they offerd 56mbit/8mbit punker, its pretty obvious he meant 8Mb/down and 1Mb/up... excuse him for not lower-casing the "b".... geez | |
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