Friday, November 17, 2006

Time-Warner: Try Truth In Advertising

Let the buyer beware!

For the first time in nearly 60 years, the Marx family has quit doing business with the telephone company.

A part of the reason was that AT&T- the company who swallowed Southwestern Bell- began billing us for services we either discontinued long ago or never had.

Time-Warner - the company that provides this household's television and Internet service - was offering digital phone service and - with the sweetening of a years' free movie channels thrown in - we took the bait.

This is turning out to be a big mistake.

Since the initial T-W installation on Friday, November 3 there have been 4 service calls.
All were necessary to revive my Internet 'Roadrunner' service in addition to the new digital phone service - which often rendered the home phones unusable for as long as 10 minutes at a time.

One service tech even admitted that T-W was "having lots of problems with digital phone" service.

Today, apparently T-W's entire digital phone network went down - and stayed down for nearly 30 minutes. No calls could be made - including emergency services 9-1-1.

To make matters worse- it took more than 45 minutes to reach T-W's service department once service was restored.

In fact- my lady in Vancouver, BC, Canada was able to reach T-W HERE and find out what went wrong before I could - "a Sprint (comm company) circuit (failed)."

Time-Warner heavily advertises their digital phone service on electronic and print media.

What T-W does NOT advertise is the "lots of problems" that comes with their digital phone service and what a customer is to do in case of an emergency requiring use of the phone.

They do not provide a backup cell phone.

Time-Warner - I suggest you back off the promotions of this service until you get all the bugs worked out.

Or at LEAST tell people it's anything but 100% reliable after installation or on calm sunny days.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We've been down 5 times in the past two weeks. No Tv. No Phone. No Roadrunner. We've been with them for 3 years. No clue why this is happening. This morning (11/20) I woke up at 530 to feed the boy and lo and behold... all gone.

Some advice... after 5 outages I've learned how to manipulate their phone system... While they have 3 options... hit Roadrunner then you get a few more options for the various malfunctions... hit the least likely option... operator within 3 minutes the past 3 times. I'm pretty sure all their customer service folks know what to do. That having been said... I've had 5 outages in 2 weeks.

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