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Review by Selenia See Profile

  • Location: Pittsfield, Berkshire, MA, USA
  • Cost: $44 per month (month by month)
  • Install: about 8 days
Good speeds all day and extremely rock solid connection. Now you can speak to a local human being for tech support!
Not really any anymore, long as they don't decide on low caps down the road.
Good solid connection. Advertised speed and low pings. Just use alternate DNS servers as they do use DNS redirection.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

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.

Update: Not much to say except support is now local and there have been no problems to report since my last review update. Full speed all the time. No apparent traffic shaping either. It must have been some sort of adjustments they were doing to their network management that seemed to act like it for a small period. All in all I have been loving how trouble-free it's been and reliably delivering my rated speed. I did downgrade to standard due to 1 mbit upload on both that and Turbo. The extra downstream is not worth it without more upstream too.

Update. Updated the good, bad and botto0m line as I forgot to with last review update. I figure those are important to reflect my current experience.

member for 17.5 years, 5455 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 14.2 years ago


Anonymous_
Anonymous
Premium Member
join:2004-06-21
127.0.0.1

1 edit

Anonymous_

Premium Member

1

NO Such things as Traffic shaping i get full speed ALL DAY on torrent

1.2 megabyte/s

upload is fine

»Re: [TWC] TW Officially Announces Packet Shaping for All RR User

Robdiablo
@rr.com

Robdiablo

Anon

SUpport

wow it will be ridiculous if every tech support on the phone have to learn every os's there is,Do you know how much money have to be spend to teach about using Fedora ,Ubuntu and so on + the top os's ..I think only Windows xp and later can be supported and os x ,if you have any other operating system that means ur smart enough to fix it yourself..or if you want that kind of support start paying over $100 a month for only 10mb d and 1 up

Selenia
Gentoo Convert
Premium Member
join:2006-09-22
Fort Smith, AR

Selenia

Premium Member

Re: SUpport

That's about the least of my worries now, but the annoying thing is I do what they say with my OS and they still tell me that I need to use Windows. I don't have to use any crapware I don't want. It shouldn't affect the core of what they do.
iansltx
join:2007-02-19
Austin, TX

iansltx

Member

Re: SUpport

Agreed. ISPs provide internet connectivity. Every modern OS can do a ping, and if you're not using a repoted OS you know how to do a ping on your OS, more 'n' likely. Also, some techs don't even know what OS X is...now THAT'S bad.

As is calling Linux a "hack". Grr.

Zen6
@rr.com

Zen6

Anon

RR

Landlords are notorious for not allowing phone and cable cos to replace bad wiring. Having lived in an apt 22 yrs I realized that you get the best the tech can give you at the time. A Tw tech replaced the line for my apt and my LL sued them for damage to the building.

dunworkin
Premium Member
join:2006-12-18
Bellflower, CA

dunworkin

Premium Member

Can't really complain about the service. It has it's hick ups, just like them all. Speed is very good for most of the day and only gets raggity-andy during the evenings, on occasion. I really can't get too excited when there are problems as they are usually minor and far between. Plus, life is too short to let a cable connection help shorten it.

Selenia
Gentoo Convert
Premium Member
join:2006-09-22
Fort Smith, AR

Selenia

Premium Member

Re: RR

Well, I do think that TWC has had it together once again(like they used to) for quite some time. Just seems that this exchange, which took over many Adelphia areas, took a long while to adjust to the change. i am also glad to see that the local TWC sees that this outsourced support just doesn't work and now lets you speak directly to them. While there is no FIOS competition in my area, I have to hand it to Verizon for scaring cable companies into providing better service =) I am actually as happy as I used to be with Roadrunner, which is saying alot(hence the high scores).