Why I’m Firing TimeWarner Cable TV

I’ve been pretty dissatisfied with TimeWarner cable for a long time. Some of this stems from having run across several lousy contractors/technicians. But my more recent complaints include:

  1. A very high number of bugs in their DVR programming.
    It seems that each DVR code update fixes one or two bugs, but always adds a few new bugs. They evidently do not test their code before delivering it to my DVR. I say this because I typically find bugs within minutes of using the updated code. I can’t recall a time when there weren’t bugs in my DVR, even after exchanging units, trying different models, etc. As the director of a large group of programmers, I know that I shouldn’t be discovering their bugs for them. That’s what Software Testing and QA is all about.
  2. Dishonest technical support
    They appear to have a standard response of “Oh, we fixed something in our back-end (or database).” I’ve heard this multiple times in situations where it was pretty clear to me that this was a stalling tactic, or an item on their support check-list. For example, on New Year’s day I was unable to watch video-on-demand, including trailers. I suspect that a lot of folks were home that day, and the high volume of on-demand streaming overloaded their back-end systems. I remember thinking at the time “this will be resolved tomorrow when everyone goes back to work”. Well, a few days later I started getting recorded phone calls informing me that “they had done some investigating and fixed some settings in their database, would I please retry the problem to see if it had been fixed.” Sheesh. Liars.
  3. Automated, nagging phone calls. They’re using computer generated phone calls to repeatedly call me day and night. I scheduled a technician to come out as a result of the New Years outage, but I’ve also been having low signal problems (intermittent pixellation). Now their computer is calling me with a recorded message lying to me about having “fixed the problem”, and would I please confirm and call them back at some stated phone number, otherwise my technician appointment might be cancelled. The message is fairly short, and the phone number stated twice before hanging up. WTF? How about giving me a chance to write the number down? To make matters worse, their computer wouldn’t leave a message when I didn’t answer, so I couldn’t even get the number from replaying their message. Does anybody at TimeWarner every try using their own service?

On the one hand, they provide the fastest internet service in my area. The RV park where my RV is currently parked provides cable hookups at the site, so TimeWarner is conveniently available to me when not traveling. And it’s pretty time consuming and inconvenient to switch provides (eg. cable to Dish or DirecTV). However, I feel like I’m not being a responsible consumer by continuing to subscribe to such an unethical, incompetent company.

Most of the people I know switched to Dish, DirecTV, or U-Verse long ago. Since I live in an RV, my options are somewhat limited. I don’t have the option of U-Verse, and until recently the mobile antennas available for Dish and DirecTV only support 1 channel viewing/recording. This has changed recently though, so I’ll be investigating my options and making a switch to Dish or DirecTV.

As inconvenient and expensive as it will be to switch, I refuse to continue to support a company that treats its customers like this.

TimeWarner, your monopoly on cable service is not enough to keep me as a customer. Get your act together or go out of business.

Follow up note 1/15/14

We had Dish installed last week and have been delighted. I’m sorry that I waited so long to make the switch. Primetime Anytime is awesome, and the responsiveness of the box to the remote is astounding. Installation was a breeze. We called on Saturday, and they installed it on Monday morning!

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