I am not here to merely complain that TWC does suck. To a lot of people paying hundreds of dollars a month for a handful of channels that you watch and a couple hundred you don’t is reason enough. And that doesn’t even take into account the joy of dealing with the faceless obstructionists in their customer service and tech support department, or the intermittent picture freezing and the pixelated, jittery picture quality. This particular reason for saying TWC sucks goes a lot deeper and started, for me, in July of 2011.
I had just gotten back from a vacation back east and was reviewing my TiVO for shows that it caught while I was away. Fully half of them were nothing more than hour long screens saying “This channel is not currently available, please try again later.” Sure it had happened a few times before but seeing it all piled up from a week’s worth of shows made me realize something.
Trying to record an HD channel was a pain in the ass, and as likely to fail as not.
So I called customer service and complained. And the tech support person (though always courteous and, seemingly, eager and willing to resolve the issue) made me go through the same rigmarole I had been through a dozen times before when I called TWC with cable issues: Unplug the cable box, count to 5, and plug it back in.
“It was probably just a transient issue and the box needed resetting.”
Telling the TWC tech on the other end of the line that I had already done that didn’t seem to have any effect on his unswerving attention to his scripted tech support spiel. I was told to call back if it happened again. It did. Several times.
Each time I call TWC tech support we do the same dance, reboot the cable box and check the diagnostics from his end.
After doing this dance a few times I insist they send a tech. Fortunately TWC has come to realize that setting times for a tech visit in a six hour window between 8AM and 5PM weekdays is unrealistic. You can now get a tech visit after 5PM (5 to 7 in fact) within a couple of days of your call.
So a couple of days later a friendly and willing-to-help field tech comes out to investigate the issue. This will be the first of about five visits from him and his colleagues. All of whom were friendly, kind and seemingly knowledgeable about these issues and willing to do whatever it took to fix my issue.
Over the next two to three months a series of TWC field tech replaced my cable box and various cable runs, a couple of connectors and a splitter or two. And each time I was told that if that didn’t fix the issue to call back and they would continue to troubleshoot.
Just so you understand, I am a computer technician by inclination and career. I have been troubleshooting PCs and Macs and the networks they connect to in corporate, educational and home environments for twenty years now. So I understand that troubleshooting issues like this can take some time and sometimes require the expertise of more than one person. So I am not being impatient, quite the contrary, I was actively aware and concerned that I showed patience and willingness to work with them to effect a solution.
But after two or three months of techs tromping thru my house, attic and yard I was about fed up and moved my TiVO recordings to non-HD channels and gave up. For a while.
Summer comes to an end and Fall drops by for a visit, bringing with it the new TV season.
Yes I readily admit I watch way too much TV, but I like it.
And with the new TV season I find a few new shows to watch and foolishly attempt to record them off of one of the “free” HD channels that TWC includes (for “free”) in my cable subscription. And the same damn problem rears its ugly head on a couple of those channels. Funny how it never happens on any of the broadcast channels… but I digress.
My annoyance factor has now, thanks to my break from dealing with TWC support, decreased below some sort of strange arbitrary threshold. Or maybe my annoyance at not getting the service I paid for exceeded my annoyance at dealing with TWC support. Regardless I, again, embarked upon the murky sea that is TWC technical support.
In all of their advertising, promotional materials and on their website they refer to High Definition channels as “Free.” they don’t charge you extra for an HD box as seemingly all of the boxes (DVR and otherwise) support HD and if you happen to have one of the older HD boxes you pay the same rates as someone with an HD box. In fact their customer service people even insist on referring to HD as “free.”
This will play into our endgame…
So I get on the phone with one of their first level support people, you know the ones. They answer the phone and follow a script, “have you rebooted your cable box? Have you un-plugged it and plugged it back in? Well I don’t see any outages in your area. I can schedule a technician to come out and have a look.”
I try not to sigh too heavily into the phone and agree to a visit, yet again, from a TWC field technician.
On the appointed time he arrives at my door, I explain the issue and all of the symptoms. He is polite and seems genuinely interested in solving this puzzle for me (as are all of the TWC field techs I had dealt with before and since) and proceeds to check signal levels, cabling, connectors, the cable box itself and a host of other things. When finished making any changes he asks me to call back if it happens again.
It does.
Over and over and over.
Over the span of the next few months, I get visited by several friendly TWC field technicians who are all puzzled by what is going on. They all investigate a variety of things that could be causing my HD channel tuning issue. The cable box is replaced at least three times. Also replaced were various cable runs inside and outside the house. Splitters, connectors and the like were also replaced. Supervisors were consulted during the service call and sometimes more than one tech arrived to investigate my ongoing issue. I learned something interesting.
If you have 4 service calls in a 30 day period your issue gets escalated and they send out a senior tech and involve a supervisor and possibly sacrifice a chicken in your name as well for all I know. What I do know is that the period between visits went down and more things started happening.
Like what? Well, I’ll tell you. They installed an amplifier in the attic to increase the signal strength and when that didn’t work they called a cable tech to look at some issues with the cable runs to my neighborhood. Guess what they found? That is what I am doing too, guessing. I never found out except to call if the issue recurred.
Guess what, it did. By this time I was down to recording just one show off of an HD channel a week (AMC’s The Walking Dead, if you must know.) mostly because AMC ran it again many times so it was unlikely I would miss an episode. Oh, did I mention that by this time it was late February. Remember when this started, yeah the previous July, eight months earlier.
By this time the tech visiting my house and the ones I was able to get on the phone were a bit more senior to the ones I had dealt with when I first started this journey seemingly in my teens. This meant that I got really good at getting thru the TWC support phone drones to someone with the knowledge and authority to (supposedly) do something. And with each call and each visit I got increasingly authoritative assurances that they would fix the problem ASAP.
After yet another Monday morning seeing that my TiVO recorded an hour of, “We’re sorry but this channel is not currently available.” Instead of The Walking Dead, I call the field tech who last visited on his personal TWC phone. And for the umpteenthumpteenth time I explained the symptoms.
The symptoms of this issue manifest themselves very shortly after tuning to the channel. I get maybe a second of the program video and audio and then that screen kicks in: “we’re sorry but this channel is not currently available, press [the little yellow triangle button on your remote] to try again.” When I press that button nothing happens. But when I hit the channel up/down button and then tune back to the channel with the problem sometimes the channel came back up just fine. Recently tuning away and then back works more often than not, when this started back in July it almost never did. So somewhere along the way they did fix it a little bit. While that works great if I am in front of the TV, my TiVO can’t be programmed to tune in a channel by going to it twice in a row.
This time the tech paused for a moment and said, let me check on something and get right back to you.
And, sure enough, he did get right back to me. He told me that what I was describing (and what I had described all along, since July) is a known bug in their system and he had no idea when it would get fixed. I believe he also may have recommended I call TWC customer support and speak to a supervisor about that. I am not entirely sure as a red haze started to descend over my vision.
After calming myself down a bit I called TWC and worked my way thru the phone maze of TWC customer support. I told the first person I talked to a brief history of my problem and what the field tech had just told me. He confessed that it happened to him all the time. He got me to a supervisor who also confessed that she had the same problem and after conferring with one of her technical resources confirmed the existence of the bug and apologized but was not able to offer a timeframe for a possible projected fix.
It was then that I got a little insistent about my problem; paying for a service that was not as advertised, that had an acknowledged bug for wich there was no fix nor a time frame for getting it fixed. She then said something that must have been drilled into her at birth, “I’m sorry sir but HD channels are a free part of your TWC service, you don’t pay for them.”
And nothing I said would convince her otherwise. So I guess I had learned that I don’t actually pay for HD service. Just like I don’t pay for the raisins in raisin bran, they come free with my box of bran flakes… grrrr…
After banging my head against that wall for a good 10 minutes I gave up and said that regardless of all of that, I Was Not Happy With My TWC Cable Service and felt that I should get, at least, a partial refund for the 8 months of messed up service and trouble I had gone through trying to get it fixed, plus a discount on my cable bill going forward.
She hemmed and hawed for a bit and ended up refunding me the “most she could” on past cable service ($100.00) and found a discount deal that she could apply to my cable bill going forward. I thanked her for her time and hung up.
So, Steve, why didn’t you just sign up for ATT U-Verse?
I hear they have a much better signal, better cable box interface and don’t suffer from the intermittent freezing and stuttering on TWC that I had learned to put up with since coming to Austin in ’05? Good question! When ATT were rolling U-Verse out in Austin I got visits from ATT salespeople and a ton of junk mail about it. But I foolishly ignored it for a year or two and the junk mail eventually stopped.
So about halfway thru this ordeal I went to the U-Verse web page and tried to sign up. No joy. Being fairly determined to dump TWC I went to an ATT store that sold U-Verse. After a bit of behind the scenes checking it looked like it was possibly not available in my area. But they put in a request for a field tech to check on that in my neighborhood and promised to get back to me. Sure enough U-Verse wasn’t available in my neighborhood, though it probably would be, eventually. So I was stuck with TWC unless I wanted Satellite and DSL, which pretty much sucked. And besides TWC’s cable modems were rock solid. I almost never had an outage or a problem. So I was stuck with TWC.
Joy!
So I learned a lot about working with TWC and using their cable service.
- Their TV service basically sucks. Maybe it is because it is older technology that has passed its sell-by date or they are trying to fit a gallon of content into an 8oz. cup. Don’t know, don’t care.
- If you connect your HDMI TV to the TWC HD cable box with an HDMI cable and then try to record a show on your TiVO (which is connected via the composite [analog] connectors) it won’t record. Because the cable box doesn’t see anything on the other end of the HDMI cable (my TV). So the TiVO ends up recording an hours worth of a copy protection error. So I’m stuck with the lower quality composite HD from the cable box to my shiny new 52-inch HDTV instead of the better quality HDMI signal if I want to record in non-HD on my TiVO while the TV is off. (got that?)
- Everyone at TWC is unfailingly polite and seemingly dedicated to getting your issue fixed. Unfortunately that is just not possible sometimes.
- If you have enough problems in a 30 day period (4 calls to support on the same issue) your call gets automatically escalated. So keep calling!
- Be insistent enough and polite enough and eventually they will either fix it or yield to your request for a (partial) refund and rate reduction.
- If U-Verse (or Verizon’s FIOS) is available in your area, cut your losses and switch over. From what I have heard you won’t regret it.
Shortly after I posted this a friend wrote back with a great quote, I had to share:
“…Not to mention that TWC charges more than what is morally appropriate for disgusting programming.”