Held Hostage!

[koØm]

So, early Saturday morning, my mailman dropped off my second SDR Dongle which, I am going to use to build myself a Trunk-Tracking Scanner for $19.99 :

https://sites.google.com/site/policescannerhowto/

One of the steps involved required that I install cygwin to my laptop; silly me, I went for the default (ALL) installation on cygwin and, it downloaded every proggie and all of their dependencies that will fit in the Cygwin terminal.

Understanding that I mistakenly ordered the whole "Buffet", I put the scanner install on hold, kicked back and watched a sporting event that was being streamed online to my home network (all clients have fixed IP addresses) while for better than an hour, my laptop sucked down data until, at less than the half way point of being completed, my Internet connection went down.........F*CK!

I spent an hour T/S and bit chasing on my end; even switched out my router to eliminate that. Everything was good on my end all the way back to the Cable gateway device; phone was on so, I knew the Internet was being piped in but, all my devices were cut off from the DNS server. It is 10:50 p.m. on Saturday night; and my head started to swim.

With full knowledge that I was going to be connected to an off-shore help desk, I had no choice but to call; I was connect to "Jasper" who of course had to get down his trouble-shooting checklist. This involved the "resetting" of the gateway, my switch and router, and restarting my computer. After all this runaround, "Jeffrey" (we spent so much time that the S.O.B. forgot who he introduced himself as at the start of the call) announced that my router was bad.........Can you say, "Bullshit!!!" ?

I disagreed with his conclusion and he disagreed with me. He said that the earliest that he could schedule a Technician was Tuesday afternoon and threaten / reminded me that there could be a service charge involved-----I was sitting there staring at the phone-----using all my willpower not to curse this fellow out--------he is virtually hold the plug to my Internet in his hands. He offers a solution; for just a mere $10.00 extra dollars a month, I can upgrade to 20Mb download speed and, he could activate my wireless signal from his end.

I told him, "No, I am on a 'Promotional Bundle' and if anything is changed, it will change the agreement."

He said, "No it will not" and that he recommends that I upgrade to have reliable service for, "a mere $10.00 extra per month."

I again say, "No", I inform him that my network was set up using Static IP addresses and request that he reauthorize and provision my service as it was before; by this time it is 12:45 a.m. Sunday morning (eyes bugged out, steam coming out of my ears and, my hair is turning grayer as the seconds tick by).

"Jamal" again makes his recommendation that I upgrade so that he can be 100% assured that I will not have anymore "technical" problems--"Can you say veiled threat"?

By 1:00 a.m. "Jabar" had forced me to relent and agree to the upgrade; he thanked me for, "Pleasantly waiting and understanding".

My network with static IP addresses in the 192.168.1.xx range did not like his DHCP server giving out 192.168.0.xx addresses.

The cygwin install only took 15 minutes on the 20 Mb D/L line. Took a good while of Sunday afternoon changing wireless passwords and DHCP settings.

This is one helluaway to build a $19.00 scanner.

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[W2NAP]

comcast?

[koØm]

comcast?

Time Warner

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[W2NAP]

Time Warner

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pretty much the same, horrible company. monopoly.

[KG4CGC]

Was your call recorded for quality assurance?

[KC2UGV]

In your router, use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.6.6 for DNS servers... Your problems with DNS will go away.

[W2NAP]

.6.6? thought it was 8.8.4.4 at least thats the one I am using.

[W3WN]

I'd call Customer Service back, and ask the first human to escalate this to a Supervisor. Then tell said Supervisor that you'd like to know why the CSR you dealt with before refused to provide assistance as he should have under your prior contractual agreement, unless you agreed to pay a higher fee associated with a new agreement. Especially since it seems pretty clear he didn't understand that you didn't have a 'normal' residential agreement (for example, most individuals don't have static IP's)

Then I'd demand that I be returned to the previous contract and monthly rate/fee.

But that's me.

[koØm]

I'd call Customer Service back, and ask the first human to escalate this to a Supervisor. Then tell said Supervisor that you'd like to know why the CSR you dealt with before refused to provide assistance as he should have under your prior contractual agreement, unless you agreed to pay a higher fee associated with a new agreement. Especially since it seems pretty clear he didn't understand that you didn't have a 'normal' residential agreement (for example, most individuals don't have static IP's)

Then I'd demand that I be returned to the previous contract and monthly rate/fee.

But that's me.

As you can see, I am not the best at negotiating deals and contracts over the phone and, yes it was recorded for "Quality Assurance." The cable service is "Franchised" by the city which makes it a municipal service; as Tony put it, they are a monopoly but, they have something called a "Customer Retention Promotional Package" that can override the pricing schemes. Cable bills are "Pro-rated", we are billed in advance for the service that we have not received yet. This is where the leverage for the consumer comes in.

I took a trip down to the Time-Warner Customer Service center to pay my bill yesterday and voiced my concerns over the up selling of services by CSR's instead of fixing the problems that exist on their side of "the demarcation point". Thanks to information gained reading this, I had eyeball-to-eyeball talk with a CSR who agreed to allow me to keep the upgraded services (20 Mb D/L with 5 Mb U/L) for the old price and it is locked in for 12 months; I just have to cancel a month before expiration and the "Customer Retention Promotional Package" will kick back in.

My original service was "Standard" Broadband, 5 Mb Down and 1 Mb up. I had already added "Turbo-Boost" (the first Gigabyte of any D/L is at 10 Mb speed, then throttled back to 5 Mb speed) for another ten bucks a month; the "up-sell (for a mere $10.00 extra)" was to "Extreme Internet" which runs at 20 Mb D/L with no throttling back. I had the option of downgrading back to my own router but, I am seeing better throughput to my Cisco Gigabyte managed switch for the same price.

<trump-speak>"They're losers - I am the winner, my D/L pipeline is bigger at the lower price"</trump-speak>

ETA: The cable gateway was set up as a "Bridge", all DNS and DHCP was handled by my layer 3 device; this was not the first time they pulled this stunt. Usually, when I lose DNS, I change to a "Cross-over" cable to the gateway and the networks comes back up. When it goes back down again, I go back to a straight-thru cable between the router and the cable gateway and it pops back up. This time, neither cross-over cable or straight connection made a difference, IMHO my Router was blocked on a layer 2 level (MAC Address) on their system.

The cable gateway is now running as Bridged-with NAT showing two networks, a 192.168.1.xx and a 192.168.0.xx

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