Review by gkloepfer 
member for 300 days, 359 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 300 days ago
 Austin,Travis,TX
 Contract price not specified.  "Currently no caps, works much of the time, can get good pricing, no contract req'd" "Difficult to get fixes when problems in neighborhood" "Most flexible and best overall ISP option I've found"
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(ratings match consensus)
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Ordered standard RoadRunner service (from Time Warner Cable), which they sometimes advertise as 7Mbits/768K (down/up), but are now advertising as 10M/1M. I do not have cable TV or telephone service.
Ordering: Order process is relatively straightforward. Being nice to the CSR can usually get you some kind of promotional pricing ranging from free installation to 6 months/1 year of reduced price service or both. You will need to call each year to beg for promotional pricing to continue, and they will usually give you some kind of break.
Reliability: There are issues with something in the outside plant in this neighborhood that Time Warner Cable (TWC) really doesn't want to acknowledge. Service will be fine for months, then all of a sudden there will be frequent service outages lasting from 1-5 minutes (occasionally longer) that interrupt connections (very annoying). Reporting this will cause TWC to send a tech to the house, where they will find no problem since the issues are intermittent. But they will still cut up the cable and replace the connectors and all that stuff to no avail. This is my biggest complaint about the service. When it works, it works great. When it doesn't, you'll want to scream in agony hoping someone will hear.
Speed: In Austin, it seems that power boost is a thing of the past. Speeds for 10M/1M service typically measure close to advertised (the DSLreports Java speed tests are measuring slower lately as of July, 2012, and it's hard to tell if it's the testing sites or the ISP). Overall, though, speed is acceptable and appears to be as promised.
Equipment: For standard RoadRunner service, they usually will give you a Cisco/Scientific Atlanta DPC2100R2. If you have issues, they have no trouble swapping out the cable modem for free if you bring it down to a TWC office. In fact, I have never had a problem doing this.
IPv6: While RoadRunner/TWC in Austin has not officially announced (as of July, 2012) that they have rolled-out IPv6, I am able to use DHCPv6 to request a single IPv6 address or a dynamic /64 prefix (with the proper switch on dhclient), and they are running native dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6). I have written a brief article on the pros and cons of this at »www.kloepfer.org/ipv6-homenet.html .
Other broadband options: At my location we have (as of recently) at&t U-Verse (previously DSL) and Clearwire (Clear) Internet as other choices (not including satellite and cell-based services). at&t requires a hefty install fee for Internet-only installations, and my understanding is that Clear has inconsistent service speeds (I don't have personal experience with it though).
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