CrunchGear

“Maybe that’s why I’m going to cancel my cable today and just pirate everything via BitTorrent. Suckers!”

When I moved to Middle Village, Queens about a year ago, I came to the same conclusion right away. Two now-almost-full 500gb external HDD’s later (one for movies and one for TV), I’m very happy to have traded Cable TV for BitTorrent.

I guess that makes me unreasonable, too.

I’ll bet $5 the TV distortion problem and the cable slowness are caused by the same root issue. I’ll bet $10 you’ll never get sufficient tech support from TWC to find that out.

I have Time Warner Cable internet in Austin and I have had the opposite experience. 8Mb/s and I use Bit Torrent and Usenet constantly without a hint of throttling.

I pay way too much for digital cable from those TWC jackasses. My internet works ok, but the DVR, the entire reason I sprung for digitial cable, loves to pixelate every damn movie I dvr. And most of those stations in the 100’s wont even tune in. The humanity.

As soon as I go HD (I’m so ashamed) , I’m dropping cable. That is if I can give up my live sports addiction.

Yeah I’ve always had TWC for internet and TV. I had the basic cable box for about 2 years and it was fine, though it would do the pixel thing every now and then. But I just recently upgraded to the HD box…which has like 5 HD channels.

First off, a few days after I got the box, record, FF, RW, etc etc stopped working. Called them, they told me how to reset the box, stayed on the phone with the about 15 min, it reset and when it came back up it was fixed. Cool.

Then a few days later it happened again, but this time they didn’t fix it over the phone, they wanted a guy to come out…which of course was like 5 days later, and when he did come it was ‘fixed’ by then. But I talked to him about it, he said I had a ‘new’ box where they’re still making patches for it.

..Patches? All because we have ‘the internet’ now, companies think they can release a pre-completed product because they know they’ll be able to ‘patch it’? I say F’ that! Give me something that works, that’s what I’m paying for! Now every time it screws up, I just unplug the power, plug it back in (resets it), and it usually works fine.

I haven’t had too much trouble with cable, it’s decently fast. Though I agree with the BitTorrent part of your article. When either my room mate or I are torrenting, internet turns to shit. Though I’ve found that uTorrent with right settings runs great and I’ve had no trouble with being online at the same time, nor does my room mate. But my room mate still runs BitComent, which pretty much stops all internet connectivity.

I’ve also got my torrents on a scheduler, so it’ll only start when I’m asleep, etc etc.

But it’s still lame, agreed.

FU-TWC

How ironic… I support a few people who work from home connections on the “business plan” but the packet lost and slow speeds usually causes me about a dozen phone calls a week from employees who can’t connect to the VPN.
Let alone the support sucks and were paying for the business service which cost a lot more $$$$

Try ATT’s DSL, it’s much faster and the service is decent and best of all it’s faster and costs a third as much, at least in Milwaukee but the problems you described are the same as what I had

I am actually experiencing a much more blatant response from Time Warner when I use a bittorrent client. If I have no bittorrent running I have one of the best internet connections I’ve had and I never loose connection. If I run bittorrent, my entire internet connection will be lost and I have to turn off their modem and wait a few mins to get the connections back. If I have Bittorrent still running, the connection will stop within a few mins again, but if no bittorrent client is running then the connection stays up. I have tried different client on different computer with different operating systems and even a diff router and the same issue every time. Best part, when I complain about it they actually have the balls to try to sell me their internet phone. So that way they can apparently keep me from being able to make an emergency call just because they don’t like what I do with my internet connection.

I use Time-Warner in NYC, and I have the same experience as TearDownAllSigns. I used to run bittorrent all the time, but in the last couple months the entire connection gets throttled within seconds of opening up a torrent. The first time this happened, I used encryption in µTorrent and it worked fine, but ever since then, even encryption doesn’t work. I end up having to use my work’s VPN connection for bittorrent — which is going to get me in trouble eventually, but it’s the only thing I can do. Has anyone figured out a way around this, besides just switching providers?

I did some more searching on my issue with Time Warner and I found people bitching about the same problem with my model of cable modem but back in early 2005 before deep packet inspection tools were widely available.

Ends up if you have a constant near-max upload rate with the Surfboard SB4200 going for a more than a few mins the modem has issues and kills the connection. After I throteled back my upload speed to 30, I haven’t had the issue. Here’s hoping it stays that way.

Hey guys, had all of those problems, got Direct tv and the SD picture blows away cable SD and the HD is amazing! No foreigners either in tech support!

Considering TWC uses local support for CSR and TSR, save for e-mail and CA software help, which goes to Canada/Colorado for the National Help desk…what ‘foreign’ support are you speaking of Tommy?

Interesting!

I started my bittorrent client and started downloading at a fairly decent rate then after a few moments it dropped to a trickle. I then did a Google search for bittorrent throttling and TWC. As soon as I got my search results, my bittorrent started downloading at the previous speed.

I have used TWC cable for a while now and i feel you on the bittorrents as soon as i load the client internet becomes to a halt. and about twc throttling i think it is true, if i remember right, not too long ago i read an article about twc being sued for throttling their internet.

Why don’t you stop complaining and switch to RCN. You have options. Competition is what makes companies improve.

Bit late, but the solution (I’m reasonably sure) is to limit your upload bandwidth. http://forums.pfir.org/main/messages/714/753.html For more.

Upgrade from your SB4100/4200. That was my issue (combined with having the Turbo service). It finally ended my hellish nightmare. TW was almost no help for more than a year on this, btw…and to this day have assumed no responsibility. YMMV, of course. More here (and elsewhere on the site): http://www.alexfalkenberg.com/2008/04/14/time-warner-milwaukee-roadrunner-problem-may-finally-be-fixed/