In my neighborhood we have Time Warner, it’s the only thing available. I have no real “beef” with TW except for the usual overpriced argument that you can apply to any cable company. Let’s face it, charging customers $45+ a month for internet access when you’ve already covered the cost of the lines and making 100% profit is annoying, however capitalism works. What I cannot stand for is paying full price for slow speed and poor service.
Recently I noticed that my speed was crawling (2 hours to download a 120MB file when you’re supposed to have 10MB down and 3MB up is a good sign) and called TW. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with their national help desk. And yes, it was painful. After letting them run their “mandatory” tests on my router they finally came to the conculsion that my speed was not up to par. I’m getting 800KB when I’m paying for 10MB service. You think!
A few days latter the TW tech comes out, asking “what’s the problem?” What’s the problem? Don’t you people ever read your case notes? After I filled him in we did the same battery of tests. My favorite part was when the tech told me that the speed looked fine.
Sir, you’re getting 6784 Kbs so where’s the problem?
Yes this is true, but Kb is not KB. The glazed look on his face said it all. He goes to check the lines and performs yet another battery of tests only to come back and tell me that they’ll have to send someone else out. On the positive side the tech now knows the difference between bits and bytes 
A few more days go by and nothing, haven’t heard anything or noticed any changes. So I call TW again to see where we stand. Wouldn’t you know they said that they already fixed the problem. However there was no difference in my speed. Begin yet another hour on the phone with their tech support. Though, this time they finally transferred me to a level III tech support (something I had been requesting since the start). After going through the normal tests, rinse-lather-repeat, the guy comes to the same conclusion, packet loss. What gets better is that they “need to send someone out again.” For the love of God no. I literally begged the guy not to send someone else out. I didn’t want to have to deal with their incompetent techs again. Alas, I have no choice and they’re coming out at the end of the week.
As you may recall I said that I will not pay full price for bad service. When I was off the phone with their level III tech support “guru” I called the billing department. Lets just say that I got $20 bucks knocked off (would have been more however the TV and phone are fine) and 18 movie channels free for a year. The movie channels are nothing but bribery however I’ll take what I can get. Mark my words though, if I have to put up with another incompetent tech there will be hell to pay.