Review by Selenia 
UPDATED: 60 days ago
member for 2.2 years, 230 visits, last login: 11 days ago
 Pittsfield,Berkshire,MA
 $44 per month (month by month)
 about 8 days
 "Good speeds all day and extremely rock solid connection, now that they fixed issues in my area."
 "Still some egghead phone techs. Some billing issues after changing packages(took them 3 months to fix for good)"
 "I was unhappy but now seems to be improving(fingers crossed!)"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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When I had Roadrunner installed in 2002, it was the best!(especially considering my childhood home I also now have ownership of was on Rogers until very recently) It was installed and running the next day to boot! Since then it has been a rocky road of sorts but is starting to smooth out. The worst time was when neighboring areas went through the transition from Adelphia, which resulted in a busy call center and a slow and unreliable connection for us. There were other smaller bad streaks as well.
I can say that it has been pretty reliable lately over the last year or so, though speeds do vary at times. They usually are very good and close to the advertised 10/1 except during peak times on Mondays sometimes.
You should use a host file manager, an internal DNS, or Open DNS as RR's DNS servers are just horrible. I prefer the second option because most OpenDNS servers are pretty far away, though usually still much faster than RR's, not to mention much more reliable. Random name lookup problems that come out of nowhere were the biggest annoyance, as well as some IP changes for hostnames taking forever to propagate.
Routing itself is excellent and ping times were never very bad except during the aforementioned Transition time and for a few days when they implemented traffic shaping. Routes generally follow a good short path over the 2 Tier 1 backbones connected directly to them.
Now to the ugly. The tech support on the phones should be working at Burger King in some cases. They often fail to escalate problems that obviously need it. I have had a few either disconnect me or rush me. They also somehow believe there is a difference for their purposes between IE and Firefox and that only Windows can diagnose a connection. If you're a Linux user and have problems, prepare for loads of frustration and idiocy. If you can't lie and say you're typing it exactly as they say and that you're using Windows, prepare for at least a dual boot or use VMWare and omit the fact you're using it to run Windows. Example: Selenia: I only have Firefox because I'm on Linux RR: Do you want me to help you or not? Open IE please!
or
RR: Open an MS-DOS Prompt and type ping -n 10 www.yahoo.com Selenia: I'm using Linux but I can ping for you in the Konsole just fine ping -c 10 www.yahoo.com RR: What version of Windows is that? Selenia: It's not Windows, it's Linux. Debian actually. RR: I see. Did you ever think that is the problem? You need to use what we support. Using hacked OSes only causes problems. Selenia: I see you do not have a clue!
Wasn't like I wasn't following his instructions using the syntax for my OS, I eventually demanded a supervisor and got my modem replaced. That solved the problem.
Roadrunner using traffic shaping that throttles nntp and P2P. It seems to be nowhere near as aggressive as my old ISP in my Canadian home(Rogers) and both protocols are still very usable. After they finally got the bugs out of it after implementation, it seems to cause benefit to other things during peak times, so I don't mind it too much since I use the internet for everything. It does not seem aimed at impeding your ability to download torrents and they still complete in a reasonable time usually. Seeding is not prevented either.
Overall, Roadrunner's experience can be decent using an external DNS server, provided you don't need tech support. The price is lower with bundles than is some slower dsl packages sold around here. It has its problems but I do think cable is more troubleprone overall than dsl, in my experience. It is much more stable than Rogers, but not as stable as the dsl providers I have used. It is very expensive now without packages, though that wasn't the case when I had my service connected and my rate never up before I got the packaged service with phone and digital cable. I only know the current rates without all that by inquiring for a friend who lives in the same area as me. To be fair, I have met some good techs at RR but just can't seem to get many good ones on the phone. Just be prepared if you don't use Windows. My friend uses a Mac and got the same kind of runaround I got until I got smart. I can usually deal with them when I have to now. You trade service and a little stability for the fastest line this area has to offer. It might be worth it depending on your needs.
Update: Moved across town and all has been atrocious. I have been having connection issues for weeks that TWC won't make any real effort to solve. They say my building is an issue, but they didn't bother telling me this when hooking me up. Besides, I call bs on it being anything to do with the building, especially since my service worked flawless until TWC discovered my neighbor's illegal hookup. Now they would rather butt heads with my landlord(they insist on ripping up every wall) and do nothing about my connection. Same frustration, same kinds of techs, and the same taking the day off work every call. I am so sick of it!
Update: Things still are far from perfect, but Tier 3 has been on the issues that had occurred. I get excellent speeds. There apparently was and still is(to a much lesser extent) an RTS collision issue in my neighborhood. TWC I learned also overboosted signal to my building as a workaround to poor landlord cooperation with them. It caused me an issue, though an attenuator resulted in the most stable connection yet for this residence. Apparently, most are not as overboosted as me, I am just one of the first in the chain after their booster. Modems drops are down to less than 5 minutes downtime in a day, if it even happens within a day. This even includes thunderstorms that have been hitting my area heavily the past couple weeks.
I do feel so much better that TWC now seems to be making a real good faith attempt to fix this and seems to be doing whatever they think it will take. Such a contrast to the phone runaround and field tech runaround that had been typical.
Another update: As I stated in a forum thread, my connection is now rock solid after their work. Connection reliability score increased-let's hope it stays that way for good.
Oh and I upgraded to RR Turbo after the improvement. Reliability is unaffected.
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