damned ISP tech support robots

[insaneferret]

right now i want to just strangle time warner cable's tech support flunkies, for the past month i have been having 30-100% packet loss which makes using the internet near useless as anything at all takes 5 minutes to load, i have called the bastards near 15 times and every damn time i have to tear down half the LAN in my house in order to eliminate all the things they dont support and go through the same damn idiotic resetting of the modem that i've done 15 times and still does'nt help. It's the same problem i've been having for a whole damn month that i keep calling you for, nothing has changed, you'll exhaust your pitiful troubleshooting options and send me up to tier 3 support again so they can make me do the exact same thing that tier 1 did and after 1/2 hour of determining that you have no farking clue what the heck is going on, you make an appointment for a technician to come over to my house a week later for him to take one look at the system and say there's nothing wrong and leave ("some packet loss is normal"...asshole), i've had a total of 7 technicians come over and while one of them actually did replace something in the box outside, which did absolutely nothing, all of them left without doing a thing (it's uncanny how the piece of crap starts working when there's a tech over)

so yea, it's still messed up, i have another technician coming over on wednesday after calling them again and making tech support pull up the history of the account to see the crap that has been going on, so he says they will need some high level line tech to look at the main line coming to the house, but they have to schedule a regular idiot tech to come and look at it before they can schedule a line tech (asi if the previous 7 werent good enough)

grrrr, damn bastards

[Torque]

Crap! I've had that happen before. Luckily I had some statistics before the problem. So, after going through the crap you mentioned I finally talked to someone who knew somthing about networks and I said "look I play games. I know ping and packet loss. It's not working and here a trace just to show you." After that, it only took another two weeks to fix the problem. BAsically, I believe they were doing an upgrade, but they weren't about to tell joe blow consumer. But, the last guy mentioned something about upgrades in dallas.....

[Gambit]

Been there. Done that. Sympathies!

I haven't had any troubles to speak of with my broadband for a long time. But when I did, and the problem was intermittent like that, I'd hook the computer direct to modem (like they require before helping), reset modem and computer like they always ask, and run some trace routes to their home page and an external address (yahoo.com, or whatever). Save the traces to a log. Store up a few of those, with "date" and "time" command outputs, as logs, and then email them to tech support as evidence of your problems.

Some packet loss is normal, yes, but 75-100% (which is what I was getting once) is not.

[insaneferret]

bloody hell, i'm using a piece of crap 28k dial up connection because that's the highest speed of the old phone modem i had from the stone age, surprised it still even works, it had about a millimeter of dust on the card (none of my pcs have modems, only NICs)

i have 2 online quizzes to do, so does my brother, and streaming any of our classes that use live video is out of the question. and my dad uses VPN to work from home 90% of the time when he's on call (ironically doing tech support for subsurface gas lift safety valves) and we're all sharing this POS corroded us robotics modem that will probably burn out in a few hours

F U time warner

[SiFi]

Oh man! I feel fo you! I felt so relieved when I moved away for university this year that the house had broadband access in every room. If I had a drink right now, I would pour a libation in the hopes it would help you get your broadband back. Good luck!

[Raiyven]

yeah, pour it on your router in sacrifice to the bandwidth gods. Maybe Zeus will see the lightning bolts that libation makes and he'll send down some godly cable for our poor friend here :(

I can sympathise with you! I love it when you have an emergency and they direct you through your handy dandy touch-tone phone to eventually reach a dead end where they ask you to email technical support about your internet problem. I'm sure SiFi can back me up on this for our own local ISP that tells you to email them or, even better, visit their website when you're having internet problems. Mmm hmm, that's the wave fo the tech future right there.

And Zeus, if you're so great at whipping those lightning bolts, how come you cant hit the same spot twice? Ares must whip you at darts.