Those Cable Internet Sonsabitches

The BBQ Pit
1

I’ve had it up to here (Raise your hand above your head) from the @home cable internet people.

I pay $50 a month, including a second IP ($34 US) for this damned thing and it’s about as reliable as an Iraqi fighter plane. It’s now been down for FOUR CONSECUTIVE DAYS with no end in sight. The technical support line is busy - I mean busy signal, not just working a lot. The one time I got through the message said “We are having outage problems. There is no scheduled time for service to return. Thank you for choosing Rogers @Home!”

You’re not welcome, you goddamned goat felching cornholers! Lick my crusty ass-hairs!

I don’t mean to belittle the difficulty and technical savvy needed to run complex networks and such, but four days? Don’t these fuckwads have redundant systems and backup equipment? I’d at least be happy with a fucking EXPLANATION. But I do not get an explanation, because the Rogers @home people are evil.

For two years, in two different cities, these people have fucked me over time and again. When I lived in Kingston I got it in January 1999 and it didn’t work for two fucking weeks after I got it. It regularly went down for 6-12 hours at a time. Calls to technical support were abject failures because the TS people were obviously untrained - one told me I had a Mac and would not believe my assurances that my computer is an IBM-compatible - and had no power to arrange service calls anyway.

The organizational arrangement is unbelievable. MY local cable company can’t do anything and won’t accept any responsibility for internet problems, so you have to go through @home, which is entirely staffed by the untrained TS people. Above them, there is nobody to call. There is no phone number you can call, no address you can write to, listed anywhere for anyone in the organization above TS. Their organization has no down-up communication system, so the TS people are never informed as to what’s going on in the field.

I thought when I moved from Kingston to Mississauga that things would change; it’s @home in both places but through a different local cable film. I was gravely mistaken; it’s exactly as bad.

Woe and alas, in Canada cable companies are enforced by the government as local monopolies. Nobody’s allowed to compete with Rogers. In Kingston there was no high-speed phone internet, but there is here. It’s slower and harder to get two computers on, but I’ve had it. I’m switching. Fuck 'em.

2

I’m afraid it’s just as bad down here in the states. Most areas have cable monopolies here too. My (fucking hybrid) cable modem has been down for a couple days now. Just got a new NIC and can’t seem to get it to contact the modem. No IRQ or I/O conflicts on the card. Pinging the loopback adapter works fine. But the bitch-ass modem doesn’t seem to want to work. Sometimes it dials at random. Leave it plugged in with the computers off and it’ll just dial up at 3 AM, hang up after a while, and dial again in some random amount of time.

All cable companies are shit. In fact any company that has a monopoly on anything immediately turns to shit. Why pay to hire competent support people when you’re the only game in town?

3

You’re talking about internet access? I don’t know about Canada, but I didn’t think any company had a monopoly anywhere in the US. We’ve switched providers a number of times, the latest being from psn to att. We had more than four days of non-service from psn and all the info we could get was they were having “routing issues.” No indication what the problem was or when it would be resolved. We switched and haven’t had any real problems since. (And we don’t constantly get booted off the connection when we’re downloading something.

4

Monopoly on cable Internet access, not dial up. My modem is a hybrid, which means it downloads through the TV cable, but has to use a regular phone line to upload. This is because those lazy, good-for-nothing Cox (what an appopriate name. That’s exactly what they are) bastards haven’t seen fit to drag some bidirectional cable out this way. They probably won’t for another 2-3 years, either. Also can’t get DSL yet where I live. So, for high speed Internet connections, Cox is a monopoly here.

5

I am a ROGERS customer, too. Four days? Try 13. I’ve been without email for 13 fucking days! My web/internet access has been somewhat better, coming and going, mostly going, during that same interval.

You’re right - a busy signal! You’d think they’d put extra people on the phones. Christ, just having them answered would be a courtesy. They should also be bending over backwards to reassure us that not only WILL this be fixed, but that we will be compensated, if not rewarded, for putting up with their bullshit.

They should be embarrassed. They have set back my trust by years. Looks good on them, though - having just spent millions on a big ad campaign trying to attract new suckers, oops I mean subscribers.

At least my work connection isn’t from ROGERS.

BTW, we should forward this thread to Ted Rogers himself.

6

13 days, holy Christ in a shoebox. I never use @home e-mail, and now I’m glad I don’t.

What a fucking joke.

They’ve lost my business; there is nothing they can do to get it back, because I cannot trust them. I’ve called the Sympatico people and they’re getting me hooked up to their high speed service next week.

7

I live in Alberta, Edmonton to be exact. On my side of the city we use Videon cable and on the east side they use Shaw cablesystems. There is no choice in who you use if you want cable for your television or internet.

I have been lucky so far as the Videon has been flawless in it’s operation. I’d be going postal if I was paying $50.00 a month for a service that was so fucking bad.

Tear them a new asshole will ya?

8

I’m in Edmonton, on Shaw @home. And while it hasn’t been quite as bad as the Rogers guys, it’s bad enough. Sometimes the connection to the modem will just drop, and come back sometime between 5 minutes and 5 hours later. E-mail is sporadic - it works fine most of the time, but sometimes when you need it most it just doesn’t work.

My wife’s mail account died a week ago. In that time, I haven’t been able to get through to tech support. The crappy @home software that they install sucks. I go through my web browser to the @home support pages, and when you go to member services and select mail management you get a lovely 404 error (the page cannot be found).

The other day I called tech support, and got a message saying, “We are currently experiencing normal levels of support traffic. Please stay on the line. A customer support representative will be with you in… 162 minutes.”

Uh, yeah. I have nothing to do with my life that I can’t just put off for three freaking hours to wait for tech support. Good luck.

Unfortunately, where I live we do not have a choice in high speed access, since DSL doesn’t make it out to my area (too far from the substation). If I could, I’d dump @home in a second.

Their tech support is so bad it made the national media a year or so ago. They were severely under-staffed, and their hardware infrastructure was strained, leading to severe performance bottlenecks and impossible customer service.

Their solution? Why, how about a big marketing blitz to get even more people to try and use the already-congested infrastructure?

9

My DSL service started 5 days ago. Its been operative for a total of just about 24 hours now.

Calls to Verizon’s tech support involve a mandatory 40 min on hold time.

I was considering switching to cable. Now, I am not so sure.

10

I must be luck as hell…I have Qwest/U.S. Worst DSL through a Cisco 675 router…never been down (except for a brief hardware problem at my ISP…not the telcos fault)

It was a bit of a bitch to set up though…they’re not exactly mac friendly (at least when I signed up a few months ago)

11

This is getting to be a major problem because my wife needs the Net up for school, so last night I called the billing department and got through to a cable-side manager. She told me that she only worked on billing and nobody could help me except tech support; apparently, nobody is responsible for tech support above tech support. I told her I wanted a rebate and she said, to my absolute bewilderment, that she couldn’t do that either, only trech support could.

I said, “But you just told me you were in the billing department.”

“Yes, sir, but we don’t have access to…”

“Ma’am,” I said - closer to yelled, actually - “what you’re telling me is that you and the tech support department are completely different companies. You can’t talk to them, you get no information for them, you can’t arrange anything, and now you’re saying you don’t even have control over the billing even though you just told me five minutes ago you were in the billing department! I may as well be calling Burger King for help.”

“No, sir, it’s just that…”

“No, it’s not just anything. When I get my bill it says Rogers Cable. You’re a manager at Rogers Cable so you’re representing the people who provide me with internet service, so you’re going to solve this problem. I’ve been trying for four damned days to speak to tech support and now you’re saying I can’t even get a rebate unless I talk to them, so I want them right now. I want to speak to a tech support person right now, and I am not going to wait more than sixty seconds, or else I swear to God I’ll write every major newspaper in Toronto and tell them every detail about your awful service, and I’ll cancel and I’ll take twenty accounts with me.” (The last part was a lie.)

I was connected to tech support within thirty seconds.

The DHCP server is still down. Four days, no explanation. They managed to hard-IP my computer to get it to work but the second IP (for my wife’s computer) still doesn’t work, so much computer swapping is in store.

Frankly, I still don’t care. I’m getting DSL and comparing them and if DSL is even passably okay, even HALF as fast, I’m switching.

12

I’ve got AT&T Broadband cable at home - apart from getting a wee bit sluggish in the evenings, it’s worked like a champ… However, I’m in a new neighborhood where half the houses aren’t occupied yet. If they all get on cable, it MIGHT become a prob. Fortunately, DSL is available here too, so I have an alternative.

13

See, that’s the great thing about living in a shitty neighborhood. Barely anyone around me even has a computer, let alone a cable Internet connection! Of course, I do have to put up with earth-shattering bass vibrating my apartment every ten minutes, so I think that negates the greatness of fast file transfers.

14

Bwahaha
(first pit post, I won’t get rough here)

Roadrunner Cable is like the freakin Messiah compared to the shit that SWB (Southwestern Bell) DSL access put me through for 2 months before I finally gave up. That’s was worthy of its own Pit thread, but after months of intensive psychotherapy and Risperidol, I think I am over it. I’d post some links to a Forbes article, but this isn’t GD.

15

Same thing with my fucking ISP. Are there any class action lawyers around here? This is what class action lawsuites were made for.

16

This is why you go with smaller local ISP’s if you can. I started with tycho.net, and got my DSL through them. the question now is how badly do they do now that they are owned by DSL.net. Considering that it is the same staff, I hope pretty well.

17

The things I wonder about are:
-Do you have to use their browser? The one in the ad is all window and no windowpane. Hell if I’m paying extra to see less than I would with an ad bar.
-Does it really speed up something like this site?
I can see downloads being fast, but I don’t download once a month.

18

No, I don’t have to use their browser. I don’t think I even HAVE their browser. I use IE 5.0, which they support.

When it’s working properly, it is extremely fast - much, much faster than DSL. Downloads are lightning fast - I can get 20, 40 meg files faster than I can go to the kitchen for a Coke.

That’s the shame of it; it’s terrific technology, but they’re such a bad organization they’re throwing it away.

19

Sixteen (16) days without email and counting.

Busy signals on the help line.

Gotta love those zany folks at Rogers@home.

But hey, what do I know. I’m just a customer.

20

But what about sites like this one? Would they be fast?
I’ve tried it at a couple of locations that seemed to have always-on lines, so I thought it would be fast, but the pages still rolled out slowly, a few posts at a time.