Saturday, October 26, 2013

Back at TWC.. What a mess so far...


So... I just got off the phone canceling my DirecTV service because I made the switch back to TWC. I did this under the auspice that I was going to simplify my setup and give me more flexibility as far as devices. That and I was going to save some money in the process. It's been an epic mess so far.

Let's address the elephant in the room.. Why am I not cutting the cord? Well I have kids who are addicted to Disney jr and my wife and I enjoy several TV shows. There are times where I would like to watch TV or shows that I have DVR'd but the kids are the owners of the remote. (Sad but true) So that led me to my current setup.

I bought a Tivo Romio and let me say the thing is pretty awesome. I am able to control the whole thing form my iPad and watch DVR'd shows or even live TV. This means I can watch whatever I want when I want. It also means when I travel I can download shows to it for the plane or even stream it from my house. Although I have not tried those last 2 features yet I will give it a try soon.

So enter Time Warner. My original install date was October the 15th I believe. I bought a Roku so the kids could watch Netflix and use the TWC app for their stuff. I got the Tivo unpacked and cleared some room so the guy could get to my equipment. Turns out the cable outside running under the street was cut. They woudl need to have some contractor dudes come out and run a new cable. They showed up on Thursday October 24th. These guys were very polite and did a great job. Lucky for them there was conduit under the street and it only took a few minutes.

Time Warner sent the truck back out yesterday and they hooked everything up. The cable card seemed to work nicely and the 50Mbit internets seemed ok as well. I didn't really have time to play with stuff because I was working which was a big mistake. After the tech leaves I start having weird connectivity issues. I don't get any ICMP packet loss but my sessions keep timing out. So the kids are downstairs streaming and my VPN keeps dropping and I keep dropping from IRC.

When I finally get a minute to go mess with the Tivo I switch it to a HD local station. Looks good so I go over to AMCHD and it says it is not authorized. So I call them up and they try and send something to my card to make it do something.. nothing happens still locked out. I call them up and they say they are sending the tech back out here. It is a "All Day" appointment and they will call before he shows up. Next thing I do is fire up my TWC app on my roku to test it out. It tells me I am not on my home network right now which means I can't stream jackola. So I call them about that and they make me do a bunch of stuff to which I tell them I am clearly getting a TWC IP and I provide it to them. Of course the person on the other end of the phone is following some stupid script wasting their time and mine. Finally I get it could take from 24 to 72 hours to work or something like that. I figure when tech dude gets here he can check that out as well.

At about 7PM last night I have yet to hear anything. At this point I am sorta pissed and call them up. They basically give me the run around and tell me there is still a chance they might show and if they don't call back tomorrow. So I called them today because you know they never showed up and now they are coming out Monday. Now I remember why I hate cable companies. This has been nothing but fail so far. I am guessing that dude never checked the signal strength coming form the street so if I had to guess that would be it. Cable internets and TV was working fine last time I had it and the only new thing in the mix is that new cable they ran.

Now I am stuck until Monday to see what happens.. I am monitoring the drops and I already know they will say its your pfsense box. I switch over to DSL and everything works fine. so I already took out that factor. It sucks that there is a monopoly on this crap because you are forced to take whatever they give you. Once this saga is over I will definitely be getting some credits to my account.

1 comment:

  1. Preach!... I went back to WOW... great service. .but all equipment is stuck 8n the 90's : (

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