Tuesday, 22 March, 2005

Problems with my ISP

It must be my time for trouble with technical support. If you've viewed my site the last couple of days, you probably noticed that things were a little "off." I had trouble uploading my changes on Monday night. RoadRunner's technical support line had a message saying that they were doing some maintenance and that customers might experience some outages. So I went to bed.

I called RoadRunner again on Tuesday night when I still had troubles. Their message this time said "Due to network maintenance, customers with data modems should reset their modems, routers, and computers." I followed their instructions, turning everything off and then bringing everything back up in the order they specified: modem, router, computer. Still not working.

After 10 minutes on hold, Kathleen at RoadRunner answered my call. I explained the problem and that I had reset everything as suggested. Her response: "there must be something wrong with the server you're trying to upload to." I told her that I didn't think so, as I was able to upload to it from a computer that was not on RoadRunner's network, and I also have trouble sending mail through RoadRunner's server. After going 'round and 'round for a few minutes I finally asked, "Is it possible that there's a problem with RoadRunner's network?" Heresy!

It took a little more prodding before she offered to test my modem. Wonder of wonders, "Oh, my. I'm seeing 27 percent packet loss on the round trip, and these are very small packets. We'll need to send a technician out there."

Does Time Warner understand that most people have jobs where they can't just take off at a moment's notice? She wanted to send a technician out on Wednesday. When? "Sometime during the day. They will call 30 minutes before." Excuse me, but my office is a 40 minute drive from home when there's no traffic at all. Debra works about 15 minutes away, but neither of us can just drop what we're doing and head home. And why do they need me there anyway? All the connections are outside. Can't they just plug their network analyzer into the outlet box on the house and diagnose the problem? In the seven years I've had RoadRunner service, I've never had to bring the technician into the house. They've done all of their diagnostic and repair work outside. Considering the amount of rain we've had recently (including an impressive hail storm on Saturday afternoon), it's quite likely that the problem is in one of the outside connections.

But what the heck do I know? I'm just a stupid customer.