I don’t think I men­tioned it, but last August, right after I took the bar exam, I moved out of my law school apart­ment in Lesser North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City and (shud­der) moved back in with my mother in Greater Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City, because I didn’t have a job. I still don’t have a job, but I do have an inter­view this week, so that might change.

When I was in Lesser North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City Just 20 Min­utes South of Greater North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City, I had AT&T’s U-​​Verse prod­uct, which deliv­ered inter­net and tele­vi­sion over a cop­per pair. It’s almost exactly like DSL, except instead of run­ning cop­per to the CO (and lim­it­ing band­width by dis­tance), it runs cop­per to a very nearby junc­tion box (called a Video Ready Access Device or VRAD) and fiber from the VRAD to the CO. This lets them offer much more band­width so they can send TV sig­nals along with it. It was a won­der­ful ser­vice with com­pet­i­tive pric­ing. I never had prob­lems with it. (I had switched to them after my ear­lier tra­vails with Road­run­ner through Time Warner Cable.)

I had to give up the U-​​Verse when I moved out. Now I’m in an older neighborhood–the house was built in the 20s–that doesn’t have U-​​Verse ser­vice yet, so we’re stuck with cable. And guess who the local fran­chisee is? Time Warner Cable. I’ve been fight­ing with them to improve our ser­vice ever since. Last night was par­tic­u­larly bad, and in frus­tra­tion I tweeted:

This morn­ing, I got this response:

I then sent this email, which describes all the dif­fi­cul­ties I’ve been hav­ing with the ser­vice here:

Dear Time Warner Cable Peopleguys,

BH, via @TWCableHelp on Twit­ter, asked me to send you trac­erts con­cern­ing the packet loss prob­lem I have been hav­ing since August 2009 and haven’t been able to resolve.

My tweet last night
@TWCableHelp’s response this morning

I have attached three files. The first, [omit­ted] is a Ping­Plot­ter Pro dataset con­tain­ing full trac­ert data from me to Google since 4/​21/​10 (exclud­ing some small gaps when the soft­ware wasn’t run­ning). It con­tains ping times for each hop, packet loss, and jit­ter. You can dis­play it and explore it using Ping­Plot­ter Pro. If you don’t have Ping­Plot­ter Pro, you can down­load a free 30 day trial at www​.ping​plot​ter​.com. I rec­om­mend this, as it will give you the best pic­ture of what is going on here on our end of things.

The other two are screen cap­tures from Ping­Plot­ter show­ing the data.

The first, [omit­ted], shows the cur­rent* state of the route above and the last seven days on the graph (the red humps indi­cate packet loss over the route). (Here, “cur­rent” means “aver­age of the route data from 10:37:57am to 10:40:12am EDT this morn­ing,” which is when I took the screenshot.)

The sec­ond, [omit­ted] is another screen­shot, this time show­ing data from last night (10:12:57pm EDT). As you can see, utterly unac­cept­able lev­els of packet loss.

Here are the symptoms:

In the evenings, we expe­ri­ence prob­lems with our inter­net ser­vice AND our tele­vi­sion ser­vice. On the TV side of things, HD chan­nels will block up, audio will drop out, and the screen will go blank. (Since the guide upgrade a few months ago these have hap­pened more fre­quently, and the blank screens have been replaced with a “please wait” mes­sage.) This hap­pens unpre­dictably and usu­ally on higher-​​numbered HD chan­nels only. Usu­ally there are no prob­lems with non-​​HD chan­nels or local HD chan­nels. The guide is extremely slug­gish in the evening, and chang­ing chan­nels can take up to 45 sec­onds in some cases. On the inter­net side of things, the inter­net is use­less between about 9pm and mid­night for any­thing other than load­ing sim­ple web pages (very, very slowly). We can­not do any­thing more inten­sive than that. Down­load­ing email is a chore. Videos on YouTube, Hulu, &c, will not load. Most dis­tress­ing, I get dis­con­nected from World of War­craft, which I am usu­ally only able to play in the evenings due to work, and then can­not play for long due to the high packet loss. (World of War­craft is not a high-​​bandwidth appli­ca­tion. It relies on data being reli­ably and quickly deliv­ered between server and client, not on cram­ming large amounts of data down the pipe at once. Latency, as you can see from the dataset, is rel­a­tively low, though it does spike dur­ing peak hours along with the packet loss. The unre­li­a­bil­ity of packet deliv­ery to the game server is what causes dis­con­nects result­ing in non­playa­bil­ity. We require bet­ter reli­a­bil­ity of packet deliv­ery, not more band­width or lower latency.) Speed tests (run at Speedtest​.net) typ­i­cally indi­cate much slower speeds dur­ing the late evening hours.

Here is what we have tried to do about it:

The prob­lems started up last August (August 2009). We had a tech­ni­cian out who replaced the drop from the pole to the house. That mit­i­gated, but did not resolve, the prob­lems. They were man­age­able until the begin­ning of 2010, when they became much worse. In the past few months we have had tech­ni­cians out on at least 5 sep­a­rate occa­sions. They have ver­i­fied that there is no prob­lem inside our house, or with the drop from the house to the pole. (I have stopped deal­ing with the national sup­port desk because they are com­pletely unhelp­ful. I have been deal­ing directly with the local main­te­nance office for the past month. I will not call national sup­port desk ever again unless it is to close the account. I can only tol­er­ate being told to power-​​cycle my modem so many times.) On the last tech visit (which came with two tech­ni­cians, instead of the usual one), we were told that the prob­lem is area-​​wide and caused by sat­u­ra­tion of our node’s band­width, prob­a­bly caused by all the col­lege kids halfway across town, who are, inex­plic­a­bly, on the same node. They looked at the graphs and could see the node band­width cap­ping out at night. They said they would look into mov­ing us to another node, or mak­ing a hard­ware upgrade some­where, but I haven’t heard any­thing from them since, and my calls are now going unreturned.

Here is what we want, thought we were pay­ing for, and have dis­cov­ered we are not getting:

Reli­able deliv­ery of pack­ets at all hours. Watch­able prime time HD programming.

I expect you will need our account infor­ma­tion to look up our ser­vice his­tory and see what can be done. I won’t give that out in an email, so you will need to phone me. My cell phone num­ber is [omit­ted] (the account is not asso­ci­ated with that num­ber). You can call me any time. If by chance I do not pick up, leave a mes­sage and I will call you back within an hour. I will expect your call within 24 hours. Before you call, please make sure you have actu­ally read this email and looked at the attach­ments — I do not enjoy retelling the story to every sin­gle per­son I speak with about this issue. And I do not enjoy being asked to power-​​cycle my modem or router or restart my com­puter. The prob­lem is com­ing from out­side the house.

Yours,

Qwertz
Greater North­east Key Mid­west­ern Swing State City

I got a call back in just a few hours. Let’s see what happens.