Today will mark the first day since I moved back to Raleigh after graduating from university that Time-Warner Cable and their successors will no longer be part of my life and I can assure you that I will not miss them in the slightest.
To be fair, the actual broadband cable internet service was generally rock-solid and it was a very rare outage that couldn’t be cured by resetting the cable modem and letting it and the router adjust to upstream changes in the network. If that didn’t work, it was clear someone had biffed a router or buggered some cable on their end of the network and it wasn’t worth ringing the 1-800-U-A-Loser line to find out they had no clue what was going on or when service might be restored.
The biggest problem I had with the DOCSIS technology is that the upload speed sucks. Even with a couple of speed increases (including the last one I had to ring them up to get because they couldn’t be bothered to let me know that’s what you had to do!), the upload speed was a paltry 30 megabits/second at best. Usually I was lucky if I saw 8-11 megabits/second and that’s with my house literally having the head-end right outside the front door which should theoretically be the strongest signal and best service quality.
When you’re pushing more than a few gigabytes of video or photos to Google Drive or elsewhere, even a relatively small upload could take a hour or more and a two-hour edited 1080p video was likely to take all night assuming the network didn’t crap itself during the upload.
The even bigger problem was Spectrum’s “customer service” whose view of the relationship was that you were there to service their needs rather than the other way round.
I truly dreaded having to ring up “customer service” for anything. Invariably it’d be at least a hour with the level 1 call centre employee and trying to get them to understand that I’d forgotten more about DOCSIS and their own network topology than they’d ever know and that all I needed was either level two or their dispatch department.
More often than not, I’d still be subjected to their scripted questions and lousy interpersonal attitude which didn’t often do wonders for my own state of mind and blood pressure. Eventually I learnt that ringing them was completely useless…either resetting the cable modem and router would fix the problem immediately or it’d be sorted when Time-Warner/Road Runner/Spectrum bloody well felt like it.
On the very rare occasions that having them roll a truck in my direction was something I couldn’t talk them out of doing, I’d have to take a full day of work off to wait around for their idiotically long “service window” that half the time didn’t come even close to the time quoted if it happened at all. No amount of trying to get these people to understand the concept that “if someone invites you to their home, you don’t tell them that you’ll arrive at some random time between 0800 and 1200” but they’d never bother spending the money to have enough technicians to cover those times when installs would go badly which was the norm rather than the exception.
I think I rang them once in the last three years and that was to tell them that I’d swapped my personally owned cable modem for a newer model capable of handling the faster speeds. During that call, they’d admitted that the faster download speeds were available for over a year prior and was a software provisioning on their end to make the speed available but had never told me that I had to call them to get it.
I could have rang them up more often when they’d send me the annual price increase which would make my blood boil and played the “make a deal with the Retention Department” to negotiate the bill down which often involves threatening to go to a different provider. And I do like haggling but I figured Google would eventually show up so I’d suppress the urge to haggle on the price in favour of keeping my blood pressure lower for at least a brief bit of time. The only other plausible option was AT&T Fibre and…well, downdetector.com was enough reason to steer clear of that dumpster fire! 🙁
That “customer service” was a reason long time “customers” had a much less kind name for their latest company brand:
So you can imagine my joy when Google Fibre rolls into my driveway to complete the installation of the inside fibre jack and hook it up to the outside demarc installed the week before.
We did have a wee bit of an awkward situation at the start of the installation as the technician wasn’t totally on board with where the demarc had been installed (on the outside of the garage wall on the opposite side of the house from my office where the fibre jack was to go).
I was told by the gent who came round to sign me up for the service that having the demarc and inside jack on opposite sides of the house would be no problem. The reason I wanted it that way is two-fold:
- Having the jack in the office allows me to instantly diagnose if the WAN side of the network is off the air. No lights on the fibre jack (or cable modem), no Internet! As I’m often in the office or downstairs whilst working or surfing, it’s much more convenient to have the jack much closer than out in the garage to begin the analysis!
- The house already has Ethernet to other rooms and by ensuring the connection goes from the jack directly to the demarc, I can still make those wired connections available elsewhere if I need them by making one simple patch connection to the office Ethernet port which connects to a switch in the network panel that connects to the rest of the house. I’ve not had to use it but it’s nice having it available if I need a stable connection where wireless fears to go. 🙂
For a few minutes, it looked like that might well derail the inside installation (which made me glad I’d not told Spectrum to take a hike quite yet…I was going to let Fibre settle in before pulling the plug on them).
You want to know the huge difference between Spectrum and Google Fibre?
Had a Spectrum installer turned up and found something he didn’t like or didn’t want to do the install where and how I wanted it, he’d have stormed off in a huff leaving me to deal with his “customer service” and ultimately dispatch to get a more useful technician round. And maybe they’d do something about it if they ever came back…
Google’s guy starts going through the various options to make my preferred installation of the jack in the office connected to the demarc outside the garage happen.
I was able to quickly get him to dispose of the idea of relocating their demarc to outside the office as well as his second thought of co-opting the existing house Ethernet wiring to get to the jack in the office. Whilst the latter would have worked, I’d have lost the advantage of the existing cabling that I know already works in the other rooms (particularly upstairs). Also, the internal wiring is Cat-5 which is not recommended for gigabit speed (that’s why they came out with Cat-5e Ethernet!).
It’d likely work but would limit the speed tremendously even on a wired connection which is what I use for my main computer with Cat-6 from the laptop to the router. Going directly from the router to the jack with a Cat-6 cable and then from the jack to the outside demarc with a direct connection was definitely the way to go.
The only question was if the Google installer had about 150′ of cable to run from the jack to the demarc round the back of the house? Fortunately, he did have enough (barely!) and just enough cable anchors to do the job.
So even though it wasn’t the way he wanted to do the install and it certainly wasn’t the fastest option which I’m sure didn’t do much for his schedule, he was totally OK with doing it how I wanted done and understood my arguments as to why I wanted it done that way and just got on with it without losing any hint of his pleasant attitude.
Two hours later, the connection was complete and I’d done a final speed test on Spectrum and got 337.38 Mbps download (not bad for 300 megabit-rated service) and 11.78 Mbps upload.
The Cat-6 cable from the router got switched from the cable modem to the fibre jack and I expected to have to reboot the router to get it to recognise the network had completely changed out from it.
However, the router picked up the changes instantly and provisioned a new IP address off of Google’s DHCP server and I ran another speed test and got 442.59 Mbps download and 518.27 Mbps upload. Even half of the theoretical top speed of 900 Mbps on the Google one gigabit plan I’m on (two gigabit service is available but download speed was never the problem, it’s upload speed that I need and this plan is cheaper than what I was paying Spectrum and orders of magnitude faster!).
Doing a speed test on the router itself got me 585.33 Mbps download and 917.98 Mbps upload (which is the theoretical max). In practical terms, I’ll rarely hit the maximums based on how fast the other servers can serve up or receive data but that upload speed is truly ludicrous compared to what I had before.
I think it’s safe to say I’m a real happy camper right now! 🙂
At this point, I’m actually looking forward to making the last call to Spectrum customer service that I will ever make. I was going to wait a couple of days but given how amazing the new Google Fibre service turned out to be, I didn’t see any point in waiting.
Here’s the play-by-play of how that call went:
- 1121 – Ring up the “customer service” line and get the irritating voice-based VRU that wants you to talk to it rather than just giving me the numbers to navigate the VRU tree. Even if I were of a mind to actually talk to the machine (which I wasn’t!), the VRU would abort early before I could actually say anything with “I did not understand that”. The sequence to do a full disconnect is using the keypad is: 3 (remove a service), 4 (cancel), and then 3 (complete disconnect).
- 1123 – An agent comes on and wants the security code which is helpfully printed in the bill as opposed to the one that AT&T foisted upon me without my knowledge many years ago and I still can’t get them to just get rid of the damned thing as surplus to my requirements.
- 1124 – I’m put on hold as I’m getting transferred to the “Retention Department” whose job it is to try everything in their power (such as it is) to keep you from actually disconnecting the service.
- 1125 – I’m connected to Miss Bri after the briefest hold I’ve ever experienced with Time-Warner/Spectrum and we spend the next few minutes discussing what I need done and why I’m canceling the service I’ve had in various forms and at a few different addresses since 1992. And she is genuinely the most pleasant person I’ve ever spoken to in their customer service department ever…as in she is exactly what I’d been begging them on how to train their representatives to be which was polite and respectful. I actually take her through the technical details of why upload speed is far more important to my needs and she really appreciates the insight to the nitty-gritty technological details.
- 1137 – After a crash course of “DOCSIS 101” with Miss Bri, we come to the point of the call where she has to make the pitches to try to get me to stay with Spectrum even though I was honest with her that I’d already switched and Google Fibre was live in the office. The offers were $39.99 for 500 Mbps download speed service (half what I’d just installed and still lousy upload speed) or their gigabit service and mobile phone for $79.99 ($10 more than I was paying for much better Google service and without another mobile phone I have no need of having!). She appreciates me allowing her to do the pitch for the benefit of those people recording and monitoring the call (no problemo! 🙂 ).
- 1145 – Now the disconnection is happening with us taking care of the administrative minutiae which takes a few minutes to finish. Unfortunately, she’s got to read these rather long scripted messages and I imagine she loves that aspect of the job as much as I do listening to the canned spiels.
- 1206 – Disconnection order is confirmed. During the previous couple of minutes, Miss Bri mentioned the bit that they don’t typically offer to pro-rate the final bill (ironically enough, the Spectrum bill cycled the day Google installed the demarc outside the garage!). And indeed, the bill does actually have that language in the middle of the second column on the front page of the bill and I’d actually missed it (granted, the font size and my increasingly lousy eyesight weren’t exactly helpful) but unfortunately it is not in her power to summarily grant my request for pro-rating the bill and she has to kick it upstairs to her supervisor. I gently suggest that I have no problem paying for the roughly ten days of the bill I’ve used and that Spectrum offered a heck of a lot more to try to get me to stay with them than what I’m asking.
- 1213 – In the queue for the supervisor to push the case for pro-rating the bill. Miss Bri makes it clear she’s not into just doing a cold-transfer to the queue but rather waits for the supervisor to confirm they’re available before she even tries transferring the call. That is *SO* classy and she’s easily the best rep I’ve ever spoken with to the point where I’m slightly sad that I never spoke to her until the very end. I might well have had a more favourable view of her customer service colleagues had more of them been like her!
- 1226 – Miss Bri’s supervisor Marlon comes on the line and I take the opportunity to point out just what a gem Miss Bri has been during the entire phone call and that I’m genuinely sad I’d not had anywhere near that favourable an experience in the near 30 years I’d been their customer! I briefly recap why I’m leaving and that I think pro-rating the final bill is still something I think is fair in spite of the language in the bill given how long I’d been their customer.
- 1230 – Marlon says that after hearing how Miss Bri apparently described me in glowing terms (!) and experiencing a bit of it himself, he was already of a mind to reverse out the final bill entirely by back-dating the disconnect order to the beginning of the month. I’m genuinely stunned by that news…I was only pushing for pro-rating the final bill as they’d fairly earned that ten days of revenue and here he was going above and beyond to save me a few more dollars. Seriously…where were these people in all of this time?!? I’d still have left for Google Fibre but darned if they didn’t make it harder than I’d imagined it’d be with arguably the best customer service interaction I’ve had in a very long time.
- 1235 – All of the arrangements are done and the cancellation is complete and verified.
And just like that, it’s time to celebrate liberation day! 🙂