Who here has Road Runner for an ISP? Oh boy..

[Jfur]

Originally posted by: Phuz
I just completed my first month as a tier 2 tech support agent. I work for Stream Int. (shhh, i just broke my disclosure), and RR outsourced this level of support to Stream.. (we do dell/rr/palm/fujitsu... to name a few)...


Anyway, I'd just like to say to all my retar-... err, intelligent callers I lov.... er, hate you.

I love calls like:

.. "My road runner dun work"
.. "Can I get credit for that hour of downtime today? Yes sir, I believe it works out to about 4 cents."
.. "I'm getting pop-ups in Road Runner"
.. "I just wanted to call to say your service is ****"

As well as many profain, intoxicated callers.. mind you, these are Americans only.. being a Canadian some are all too funny, some are evil, and lots are really dum-... not so bright

and I love it when I clearly describe a problem (that eventaully leads to disruption of service fot our entire area) and you trivialize everything I say and then read something off a sheet of paper/flowchart



my favorite was when I finally got someone to come look at it and the guy DIO NOT fix it but noticed I was getting too much bandwidth and gave a long speech about how he "fixed" the issue for me -- I tried not to giggle too much in his face. oh, I also like the little man who came and told me explicit details about how his gf likes to have sex, as if this a normal convo to have with a woman who is alone at home with three visiting RR techs. that was fun

 

[ChefJoe]

Well, appears the rr tech came to the house a half hour early and with only a van (read: unable to check the pole for signal issues), saw that things were working fine now and was about to be on his merry way. My mother noted the low signal strength we were told about and the guy allegedly checked with that station and found that things are normal now. She let him go (I'm fuming about that one) and the cable light keeps going off and blinking (done it twice in the past 20 minutes, bringing my browsing to a halt and ruining my ATOT typing). Phuz, expect a few calls from me as I try to make my area the number one problem area in central ohio.

 

[RaySun2Be]

A friend of mine had RR installed, it was working ok for awhile, but then he was having problems connecting after awhile of being on the Internet. he called RR Tech support, they walked him through things, seemed ok. next day the problem appeared again. They sent someone out, messed with stuff for a bit, said everything was ok, and left. that night the problem appeared again. I went over, and did some troubleshooting. 1st thing I notice is that he can ping their servers, but there is significant packet loss. The strangest thing was that when he started having problems, his public ip address was replaced with a private ip address on the public side of his router. It was like he had logged into another network. Hooked up the PC directly, same thing.

We called tech support, they said the line was fine, but I told them about the packet loss (oh yeah, that's not right the tech says like he didn't think to check) and the strange IP addressing. He said they would send a tech out.

My friend called me when the field tech showed up, and I talked with him about the issues (including the packet loss, oh yeah, after he does a ping request, that's not right). So they spent about 6 hours, running new cable, changing cable ends, replaced the modem, and did some stuff outside. I don't know if they ever figured out exactly what was causing it, but something they did fixed the problem.

 

[Scootin159]

I've had RR for 3 years or so now & only ever called in for tech support once: our modem was fried. You would plug it in & it would just make a real nasty high-pitched buzz & would start to smoke after about 5 min. Anyways I just ended up going down to the local TW shop & swapped for a new one . No idea what killed it...doubt it was a power surge as it was on a surge protector & the monitor/computer on the same power strip are fine.

 

[zengeos]

Originally posted by: burnedout
I have RR for a home ISP. Going on three years now.

One call to RR tech support:

Me: "Hey, the cable light on the modem is blinking again. No connectivity."
Them: "Duh...... uh...... OK...... I'll send a tech out later today."

Call back 10 minutes later and get a different tech who actually knows whats going on:

Me: "Hey, the cable light on the modem is blinking again. No connectivity."
Them: "Oh, we are sorry sir. Our techs are working on your node. Should be up in a couple of hours."

Permanently lost the connection on a DSL line at work going into the mail server at work. Changed to another IP addy from a different provider. After Verisign updated their record within 6 hours; AOL, Netscape, Time Warner Telecom (same company, but different from Road Runner) and SW Bell updated their DNS servers within 48 hours. Do you want to hear the one about why the local RR DNS servers wouldn't/couldn't update their database files after one month? Why I was forced to convince my fellow employees with RR service to flood RR tech support with calls and e-mails so that they might correct the problem? Yeah, they finally fixed the problem on their end ............. after one month.

It works both ways.

ver 5 years with RR here. While it can be annoying when they ask you to restart your PC and your modem...and I've already done that, AND it gets annoying when they say "We don't support home networks! You need to connect your PC directly to the mode!" I just say.. "OK it's connected directly to the modem and rebooting" (even when it isn't. Usually I call because there is a backbone problem according to my traceroutes and sometimes they want me to restart my system, but more and more they seem to be understanding that traceroute problems usually mean a bad router somewhere.

Overall I'd say that RR support has been pretty good...certanly better than BANet was. More often than not there is no hold or little more than a minute or two hold and in my book that's pretty darn good!

Mark-

 

[zengeos]

Originally posted by: ChefJoe
ARGH, the <a href="mailto@mn">d@mn</a> cable light being out. Our cable modem with rr.com does that a few times a day (Grove City, OH) but occasionally does it much, much worse (seconds of cable per day). Finally called them about it and someone checked something and said we appear to have a "weak signal."

Someone will be out later today (between 5-7) to take a look (so we had to dismantle all our "extra" hubs and coax splitters - the problem still exists so at least its not equipment). Before you give me the 3rd degree on this, we pay for 3 ips but only use 1 for the linksys cable/dsl router. We only have three people in the house, but we keep the internet hooked up to 6 computers wether on or off (more when my brother's home).

Bummer...we get 5 IP's here. While I only have the 4 PC's and network printer, I still have the router for the extra security it provides.

Mark-