Customer Dissatisfaction With Cable Modem Service
Problems that Arise Due to Lack of Bandwidth Management

Beep-Beep! Net Traffic Snarls
By Max Smetannikov, Inter@ctive Week
December 20, 1999

An educated consumer is proving to be a burr under the saddle to Road Runner. The high-speed cable modem Internet provider owned by Time Warner has come under heavy criticism from network-savvy customers in San Diego, who said their access speeds have slowed to a crawl - and they've got the data to prove it.

"I signed up for the service two years ago and in the beginning it was really good. I was getting 300-kilobit-per-second downloads," said Eric Zorrilla, a current customer and a San Diego resident. "Now when you try loading a Web page, you lose so many packets that the page wouldn't load, and my speed is 5 Kbps or less - on a cable modem!"

Could this be true? Not for all 28,000 customers in the area, according to executives at Time Warner.

"There is a small set of users that are very technically astute and are able to measure network performance better than an average Net surfer," conceded Stephen McMahon, director of Road Runner at Time Warner Cable in San Diego. "But they are few, and an average person doesn't know [network slowdowns] are happening."

However, customer postings on an online support bulletin board demonstrate that serious miscalculations in bandwidth demand, equipment misconfiguration and oversubscription could be to blame for Road Runner's poor service in the area.

Subscribers to the service in high-tech San Diego, many of them engineers, have used their connections to ping Road Runner's network and measure latency and packet loss between the company's local nodes and network interconnections. When the service started deteriorating dramatically in November, some customers ran side-by-side comparisons of Road Runner's cable modem access with dial-up and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections.

In the archive of postings to the Road Runner support group obtained by Inter@ctive Week, customers complained of packet loss up to 25 percent.

One subscriber tried to use such tests to demonstrate to local Road Runner technical support staff that the problems they were collectively reporting were not just affecting individuals. Users lobbied heavily for Road Runner to seriously overhaul its local San Diego network to improve the service.

Often, such complaints fell on deaf ears, with tech support representatives asking customers simply to reboot their computers.

"I talked to a number of techies on the phone and they really didn't know what I was talking about with the packet loss - they suggested that I check my line," Zorrilla said.

According to the postings, Road Runner's problems started in April after the company's connection to upstream Internet service provider (ISP) CERFnet got clogged. The congestion was resolved about a month later when AT&T installed a new pipe. That line became oversubscribed two short months later, and Road Runner management promised to light an OC-3 (155-megabit-per-second) line from Qwest Communications International by late November. It still hasn't happened.

The situation continued to deteriorate. "I cannot get into e-mail or the Internet tonight. What is happening?" asked one user on Nov. 29.

Some customers surmised that, since cable bandwidth is a shared medium with multiple customers on one regional network cluster, Road Runner didn't split its local nodes in time to handle fewer users per cluster.

"I don't think we are anywhere near being oversubscribed," McMahon said, indicating that Road Runner's churn in the area is low and the cable ISP is still adding 200 new users per month, on average.

Oversubscription is to be expected, analysts said.

"Road Runner's focus right now is not on improving the service, but on upgrading its nationwide network to get more customers," said Zia Wigder, an analyst at Jupiter Communications. "It has been the same with both major cable ISPs - Road Runner and [Excite]@Home."

Excite@Home has had its own share of headaches, with cable access speed problems in California and Connecticut. Customer churn resulting from poor service is the only factor that will make cable ISPs improve their service, Wigder said.

It appears that may happen in San Diego. The support group is buzzing with referrals for DSL service. Road Runner's poor performance in the city stirs even more anger with local subscribers because of the company's relentless marketing campaign.

"Imagine if a restaurant had run out of food for the day but neglected to put the 'Closed' sign up [and] was still asking patrons to take a seat? That would never happen," Zorilla said.