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Review by bj9030 See Profile

  • Location: Palm Desert, Riverside, CA, USA
  • Cost: $230 per month
  • Install: about 10 days
Occasionally works
Occasionally works
Use Dixie cups and string
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The internet frequently drops for no reason. The digital phone will disconnect in the middle of calls.The phone frequently rings once, with nobody there. Lots of static on phone line.
Callers can not hear me, but I hear them and vise-versa.
The TV signal frequently drops, and the box reboots for no reason, usually in the middle of a movie.
I had all internal cabling replaced with RG!!. TWC has replaced the drop, tap, amp, and hardline, but the problem persists.

They cant seem to get it right on any of the services, but have NO problem sending me the bill every month.
Avoid this company

member for 23.5 years, 62 visits, last login: 13.4 years ago
updated 14.9 years ago


Review by martiniman See Profile

  • Location: Torrance, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Cost: $44 per month
Fast when the connection is good (up to 5Mbps)
It's rarely good and it's more expensive than FIOS (average is 1Mbps)
Go with FIOS or cheaper DSL
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I have Earthlink/Time Warner cable internet service. The service was good when it first started many years ago (faster and cheaper than DSL). But during the past year, I have been getting anywhere from 800k to 1.5Mbps service most of the time. Very rarely do I get speeds of 4-5Mbps as advertised. This is especially noticeable when watching Youtube or Hulu.

In terms of tech support, since Time Warner owns the lines and Earthlink is the ISP, there is often confusion when you call them (the people are nice though). They will always blame problems on each other and tell you to call their department. BTW, your bill comes from Time Warner, so I have no idea what Earthlink has to offer in this deal.

Earthlink email service is antiquated. They give you like 100mb, no IMAP, and has ads. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo are better and FREE.

Not worth it for $44 a month. Better off getting DSL for $28 or FIOS for $47...which is what I plan on doing in the next month or so.

member for 15 years, 77 visits, last login: 13.1 years ago
lodged 15 years ago


Review by Dankboy20 See Profile

  • Location: Santa Paula, Ventura, CA, USA
  • Cost: $150 per month (12 month contract)
  • Install: about 5 days
Sometimes, pretty fast internet..
Turbo Boost Service is a Scam.. Not worth the price for Iffy Power Boost
I would go with them as last resort!!!!
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Ordered the Time Warner Turbo Boost Package, Internet was 30MBPS down at times ridiculous speeds were being gotten, Then my Ip changed and now I get about 6MBS Down and 1 Up. I complained like an old woman but to no avail i'm screwed now with Time Warner. Paying them $150.00 for mediocre service. Anyone else notice Time Warner Dropped the speed big time???

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member for 22 years, 29 visits, last login: 13.2 years ago
updated 15 years ago







Review by shoffman11 See Profile

  • Location: Findlay, Hancock, OH, USA
  • Cost: $100 per month (4 month contract)
  • Install: about 12 days
none
Extremely poor customer service, expensive
Avoid this company at all costs
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Pre-sales information:

They make finding prices for individual services on their website difficult; they only list package deals. You have to start placing an order before you can see their ala-cart pricing or to change the internet connection speed, for example.

Installation:

I ordered service on January 2 over the phone and they did not install it until January 12. They are the first company I've ever seen that has an all-day service window; most cable companies I've dealt with usually have a 2-hour window. The first technician they sent was scheduled to come on January 7 between 8am and 6pm. He did not show up until 7:30 p.m. Once he finally got here, he saw that someone had run a cable through the window to where I wanted the modem and refused to hook up anything, not even the TV which is in a different room. (My landlord claims Time Warner ran all the cables about a year ago for the whole building.) The second tech came out on Jan 12 and hooked everything up, including the modem to the line that came in through the window that the first tech refused to use.

Connection reliability:

I have the 7 mbps Road Runner package. The speeds are ok. I've had several issues with not being able to reach certain websites due to connection timeouts (servers I connect to all the time just fine from other locations).

Tech Support/Customer service:

The last time I had to call customer service as an existing customer, I was on hold for 72 minutes. Ironically, I hung up afterward and called back to set up a new service just for giggles and got right through to an operator in under a minute.

Also, when I tried using the live chat on their website, I would bounce from "next in queue" to "second in queue" and back down and up several times. I waited about 20 minutes before just giving up.

Value:

Thankfully I only had to use their services for four months. When I signed up, they offered me basic cable (not even digital) and Road Runner High Speed Online for $79.90 with a 2-year contract and said I could cancel within 60 days. I paid that price for 2 months and when I cancelled the contract to avoid paying a $150 early termination fee, they raised my rate to $99.90/mo. for the remaining month and a half.

I would never do business with Time Warner Cable again and would not have got their service in the first place if my apartment building allowed other companies in.

member for 20.6 years, 8 visits, last login: 12.8 years ago
lodged 15 years ago


Review by marvista See Profile

  • Location: Del Mar, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Cost: $52 per month
  • Install: about 5 days
does stay up these days
raised the rates and decreased the service
I wish I was close enough to a phone office to get DSL
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I've been using Time Warner for about 8 years now, generally unhappy, but I don't seem to have much of a choice. I could only get really slow DSL, although I'm beginning to think it might be less frustrating.

Recently they have been throttling downloads. One can start doing something and speed is great - then a few minutes later things have slowed to a crawl. Its somewhat related to cable congestion (slower on nights and weekends), but I've also had the situation where I start something up at midnight, its going great, and the next morning its running like molasses and apparently was slow all night. Seems to be occurring independent of protocol or destination.

Calling service has been a complete waste of time. I end up calling them maybe once a year because I forget how pissed I got with them last time and figure that I need an answer to a question and they ought to be able to help. The people you talk to are either incompetent or unhelpful (or both). Once or twice I had something straightforward, and then it turned out that the information they gave me was completely incorrect. And this is from the second (or third) level people too. Most recently I was trying to upload some pictures to a home page they provide, using the same FTP setup I have been using for years, and which is carefully documented in their help pages. No longer worked. I call support and the guy puts me on hold for 5 minutes and comes back to tell me they no longer support FTP. However, 6 weeks later its still in the online documentation, and my email to ask for confirmation on whether FTP is or is not supported, and if so how, never got answered.

The one that takes the cake was when I had a Vonage Linksys router, and it turned out that Vonage downloaded new firmware that broke the ability of the router to forward port 25 (SMTP). It took me a few days to figure out that Vonage was the problem, and in the meanwhile I thought perhaps Time Warner was blocking SMTP and got to a level 3 support engineer who confirmed that Time Warner was blocking that port. I tried DSL at that point and found that the problem was with the Vonage router, and it turns out that Time Warner was NOT blocking ports. Like I said, talking to their customer service is just a frustrating waste of time. Vonage is history for me, but at least for VOIP I had a choice.

Recently Time Warner raised their rates. Now one has to assume that the cost of providing bandwidth is going down, they shut down their Usenet servers last summer which must have saved a bundle, they are conversing bandwidth for whatever reason, so I'm getting less and paying more.

Anyone know of any new DSL technologies on the horizon that will go long distances??

member for 17.4 years, 54 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago
updated 15 years ago


Review by n0thng2bdone See Profile

  • Location: Woodside, Queens, NY, USA
  • Cost: $29 per month
good download speeds daytime weekdays
traffic on node makes for slow DL speeds...fixed
this is a monopoly
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Update: it seems like they fixed my node! 14765 down at 8pm, 3 nights in a row. took more than 2 months though...

After 3 house calls and many phone calls my problem was determined to be related to traffic on my node. Time Warner (roadrunner, nyconnect, etc. all use same local node) told me they can't tell how long it will take for them to fix this. When I asked if I should follow up in a few days, they told me it could take weeks or months. Upgrading the node isn't a priority I guess.

One tech told me someone in an apt. nearby on the same node noticed the same thing: slow speeds at night. Last night I ran a speed test at speedtest.nyc.rr.com that showed 622kbits down! But the average speed at night is 1500kbits down, still a far cry from advertised speeds. This morning was 10000Kbits, but still, nights and weekends crawl.

The upload rate of 512kbits (I always get around 485 or about 60KB) makes seeding to good ratios pretty tough. For comparison, Optimum Online in Nassau County offers 2000kbits upstream in their standard package!

I think Time Warner is the only provider here in Woodside. Too bad. Waiting for my email from FiOS announcing its availability.

BTW-I was on the Basic plan, and found it slow so I called to upgrade to Standard, expecting to have to shell out an extra $15.00 a month. (No wonder I found it slow!) But rather than increase my fee the salesperson told me I could have the Standard package for the same price as basic for the next 12 months. So I pay 29.95 for the standard plan (10 down, .5 up,) not 44.95.

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member for 15.2 years, 4 visits, last login: 14.8 years ago
updated 15 years ago


Review by adams99 See Profile

  • Location: Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Cost: $56 per month
CSRs and techs in the field sometimes bend over backwards
Atrociously unreliable service
Order only if prepared for frequent outages
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First, an overview.

The nuts and bolts of today's service haven't changed all that much from what once was provided by Media One, and, later, if memory serves by AT&T Broadband and then by Comcast. A TWC tech once told me that many or most of their techs in the field came over from Comcast.

I'll begin with positive observations, and am a bit startled by how dramatically the positive is at variance with the negative observations that will follow.

Their telephone CSRs have been almost unfailingly polite and diligent. Yes, as others have noted, they sometimes ask users, including me, to go through troubleshooting steps that we know aren't necessary. But they have remained courteous, despite the abuse they must go through at the hands of exasperated clients (see below). I rarely have had to wait on hold for more than a few minutes to get through.

Some of their in-the-field techs have bent over backwards ... really bent over backwards to provide good service. They have provided their personal cell phone numbers. One senior tech even called just to be sure that my service had been restored properly. In comparison, consider that I waited on hold with DSL Extreme for nearly twenty minutes to simply ask a pre-sales question.

Those are the positive points about Time Warner Cable.

Now, the negative.

Unfortunately, the cable service that this helpful, doing-their-best team supports is astonishingly bad, and I choose my adjectives carefully. Astonishingly bad. It is worse than any product offering from a major corporate vendor in this user's memory. Consider: it is so bad, so terrible, that the local city attorney has actually sued TWC:

»articles.latimes.com/200 ··· i-cable5

Local media and bloggers have complained frequently and bitterly about service unreliability. For starters, plug

Time Warner cable intermittent service

into Google and take a look at a few of the links that come up.

Bottom line:

When it's up, it's fast.

If you need reliable service, and are upset by outages, look elsewhere. I'm just one voice on the Internet, and you have no reason to believe me ... but you can and should believe the Los Angeles Times article linked above, and some of what you'll discover after searching Google.

member for 21.9 years, 36 visits, last login: 12.7 years ago
updated 15.1 years ago


derekge
join:2006-06-14
North Hollywood, CA

derekge

Member

Works for me

TW cable internet has been solid for me. There were some DNS issues in early March 2009 but that was easily averted by using OpenDNS. I do question their P2P filtering practices if any - this is the one subject I have a hard time finding good info on. And even though I have a 6MB down connection, it gets killed whenever we upload big files and I don't know if upping the speed would help any.

Review by RunTwoSlow See Profile

  • Location: Moreno Valley, Riverside, CA, USA
  • Cost: $34 per month
  • Install: about 15 days
The Few times I works it was pretty Fast
I have only seen by top speed a few times
Time Warner Cable is the worst HSI provider I have ever Had
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I am in a Verizon phone service area and wanted to get DSL or Fios but they were not available in my area (to far from CO and no Fiber installed yet) So i had only one real option TW cable. Installation was a mess. I was quoted at free installation and when the installer showed up two hours after the 4 hour window he wanted to charge me $56 I called TW Customer service and was greeted by a message stating that there computer systems were down and that they could not access any accounts. After talking to several reps I was told just to pay him. I was unable to talk to a manager because they could not transfer me because the computers were down. I was in the middle of moving and did not have my check book with me so I had to tell him to leave. I made another appointment for an install and was told that the sales rep had miss quoted me and I would have to pay the $56. A week later when the second installer came out I paid the $56. He installed a no name modem. and connection was working. The modem was always very hot and when downloading files it just seemed slow (So i checked my connection speed i was paying for 6MBPS and after several test I was getting lower then 768 DSL speeds . After talking to Tech support they stated that it may be the modem, and that the modems the TW cable gives out are not the best he recommended I purchase a Motorola Surfboard ( I had to pay $65 at circuit city because TW would only give me another cheap no name modem. After installing the new modem I was still not getting close to My 6MBPS but it was faster I was getting about 1.5 - 2MBPS.I have run test on different times of the day late night and weekday and weekends I almost never see above 2MBPS TW just states that they cannot grantee speeds. and offer no solution If you have other options take them TW is the worst. (This Area used to be an Adelphia area and several of my neighbors told me that before Time Warner took over service was fast and you would ofter get faster speeds then paid for. I have talked to friends in old Comcast areas (now run by Time Warner and they have had the same experience fast service to Triable. Avoid Time Warner if you can

member for 16.9 years, 11 visits, last login: 13.7 years ago
updated 15.1 years ago


Panda99
@rr.com

Panda99

Anon

Road Runner Scores a 10 !!

I ordered Road runner because ATT could not give me U-Verse at my home in Santa Clarita, Ca..I've had ATT DSL for more than 10 years. Wanted fast speed for video downloads. I ordered Road Runner yesterday and they installed it this Morning! The Time Warner installer just left. I ran speedtest here. »www.speedtest.net/
I'm near LA .. got 6481kbps download from Bangor ME with a 980kbps upload. (They promised 7mps download with 380 upload.) I checked a speedtest site in LA and got 9825kbps download and 930kbps upload. Checked Paris France and got about 8900kps down and 950up.
Very happy. I tried a 16 min Vimeo video that usually bumps along on my old DSL and it was blown away at how fast the download occured giving me SMOOTH video all the way. No more waiting for video.
VERY HAPPY with Time Warner here in Santa Clarita Calif. They have fiber optic cable. Installer was excellent. All as promised.
I'll report any problems as I go along.

Review by Wakanska See Profile

  • Location: Hawthorne, Los Angeles, CA, USA
  • Cost: $98 per month
Service visits on time, professional
Not able to resolve latency problems and service interruptions this month
I had a commercial server account, but they are as good as canceled!
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I was told that I would be getting a high-speed package, able to run five servers at 7 mg / second download and 1 mg / second upload. I was given five static IP addresses, which I never actually put into service, but normal high speed internet service was great and very reliable until this month, when all hell broke loose. Coincidentally, I suppose, I read somewhere that TW was to begin 'peering' bandwidth, beginning early June, 2008, and I was suddenly out of service for over two days.

I did have a technician out and he reset modem, after which service came back up. I also reset modem once myself, and service came back up, but this is not a modem problem.. subsequent attempts to reset, power-down, etc. have failed to produce any effect, and service routinely slows to a crawl or is completely absent, generally between the hours of 10-11 PM and 8-9 AM. I cannot do any work online after hours, and this effectively shortens my workday and severely compromises my productivity in the many diverse responsibilities I have.

I also had my own VOIP service (MagicJack) which relied on the DSL to work, and this was so often down that I had to get a cell phone to use in the home.

Things have gotten a bit better this last week, but it is clear that I am not getting what I am paying for, so I am bailing on TW and going to ATT. I will not have any static IP addresses, but I wasn't using them, anyway.. I kept TW for the reliable service, which now no longer exists. Definitely not worth the $99 per month I was paying TW. ATT offers an 'elite' DSL internet-only service for $39, and free wi-fi at company Starbucks locations, so I'll go with that.

Vote with your wallet, folks!

member for 15.7 years, 2 visits, last login: 15.7 years ago
updated 15.1 years ago


Review by billerly See Profile

  • Location: Hampton, Hampton City, VA, USA
  • Cost: $85 per month (month by month)
Works fine 10% of the time
Terribe the Rest
This is the worst I have ever used
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The advertise 5 meg, and I can get close to that on their server. BUT!!!
anywhere else is VERY slow, and is slower than a DSL line in my home.
5 calls to customer service have not helped.

member for 16.8 years, driveby review (so far)
updated 15.1 years ago