Reporting Poor Service

and this problem will go away and service will improve and speed vs price will be much much better as well. speed will go up and prices will go down and data caps would eventually go away as competition forces telecoms to vie for your business against competitors.

This company is small potatos compared to Comcast or TimeWarner Cable and yet they have started to behave like the big companies. In fact, i'd rather be a Time Warner customer again but we fall a few miles short of being with TWC.

Barry of BBR Worldwide

and this problem will go away and service will improve and speed vs price will be much much better as well."

Ehhhhh, don't be so sure of that. At my location the local mom & pop telecom is AWFUL (768kbps cable internet) with no HD service (analog cable system) at about twice the price of the big CableCo in the next town over which offers 100mbps and digital cable.

it mostly goes back to telecom companies enjoying a defacto franchised monopoly. in the markets (not many) that have allowed 2 or more telecoms have enjoyed faster speeds and lower pricing. if there was competiton (and choice) then these poor companies would become irrelevent and disappear and a better company would buy them out and take their place. this is why states (mostly republican controlled) are passing legislation to keep municipal broadband and google fiber from coming in and generating competition for the entrenched telecoms.

there is a way to get improved speeds and lower pricing but you have to get together with your fellow citizens at city council meetings and complain and get the city to make lower pricing and faster speeds a requirement to renew the telecoms franchise agreement.

are always the same price and have been for as long as I have been paying attention.  Gasoline is within a penny or two at adjacent stations.  Same with cable service here.  I can choose from three companies which have cable strung to my curb and they are all charging the same within a few dollars for the service I have.  So much for competition.

For 10 Mbs internet and VOIP phone and no TV my bill with fees and taxes is $114 per month.  How does my "competive" rate compare to others?  At first, there was only one cable choice but when the other two became available there was no decrease in cost.

Neil

My experience with Time Warner Cable when I lived in Elizabeth City was God awful.  the internet was constantly going out if the wind blew in the wrong direction. It was a little better on North Road street but at pasquotank station it was god-awful. My internet speeds we're not much more than what you would get with a DSL connection. And you could forget running a radio station streaming at 128 kilobits per second to a server that was located elsewhere not on my property. I have to make that perfectly clear because I've gotten many responses to this.

 when I lived in Lansing Michigan on when I lived in Lansing Michigan on the outskirts we had Millennium digital media which later became Broadstripe. Their internet was actually better and that was a few years before I moved to North Carolina. That company happened to be a mom and pop company you might as well say because they were very small.

TWC was good to us in London,Ky and that was when we were running Rock 105 Three over the fm / am and internet. Here I can never rely on TVS to stay connected long enough to provide a live feed from a receiver of BBR. (currently offering 50 Mbps)

I have a feeling TVS won't be too kind to us after they receive a notice from the Feds, of course legally they cannot drop us as a customer just because i brought this up to the FCC.

But they can become total jerks to me over the phone and make my experience with customer service a bad one.

Right now, it's been slow or non-responsive at times. (our internet)
It's a shame though, i really would like to stream online again but Stephanie and I have had to cut back on a lot of things as our finances are a bit sparse this year.

Barry of BBR WorldWide.

TVS must have received their notice or letter from the FCC or they realized they'd better look deeper into the problem and do something about it.

Today as I was in town and Stephanie was here not feeling well, a TVS Technician comes over and ask's what the problem was (as if we haven't covered that enough already) and she tells him,

1. the service drops out or slows to a crawl
2. somtimes it's out for hours even after rebooting the modem
3. we have been trying to tell you the cable from the pole to the house is weak and sagging

This guy insist's that isn't the trouble and wants to know if she is using a laptop or a desktop pc, she says a laptop, he said well unless i can witness the trouble myself i won't know how to fix it....(where was his gear? did he forget it at the shop?) so she brings her laptop out to him and he fumbles around with it because he has no idea how to work Firefox browser on a Linux machine, he locks up her laptop, she fixes it hands it back to him, he does speed tests from several different speed test websites expecting to prove us wrong.

After watching the speed drop lower and lower with each test and the ping climbing to levels  nearing seconds instead of miliseconds he just keeps saying Hmm, hmm.

Eventually he gives in and say's he really isn't sure what is wrong with it but would have it fixed this evening or tomorrow Nov 2. With a bunch of other filler words he leaves here with the impression that my wife was just your average housewife with just a high school education.

Hardly! She is IT and software development trained at one of the best community colleges in the state. Of course, she didn't tell him that not that it means anything to him.
Most of these technicians are trained at the bare minimum so that the cable company can get them out working in the field as fast as they can.

My wife knows more about this stuff than he was giving her credit for.
So perhaps the FCC did put a bug in their ear after all, i am still waiting on that letter in the mail.

Barry of BBR Yardwide

Our local tech for ATT is a great guy.  He knows the problems with the company he represents and if you know him, just tells us to call him direct.  He freely admits that he is not a computer person.  But he has the equipment to do throughput tests, and will usually try to override what corporate tells him is possible.   BTW, ATT is pretty much our only internet option unless you do satellite or wireless which sucks universally because of costs/limitations.

Our little town does not have fiber unfortunately.  We are working with 60 year old copper in many cases and it really limits bandwidth. 

But, we have great technician at least for phone service and internet.  

We had a similiar arrangement with the local Cable techs at the full power. The full power now uses a WISP and honestly the service couldn't be better, zero dropouts and a 20down 20up speed. The ping is usually about 1ms.

Craigf said "BTW, ATT is pretty much our only internet option unless you do satellite or wireless which sucks universally because of costs/limitations.

Our little town does not have fiber unfortunately.  We are working with 60 year old copper in many cases and it really limits bandwidth."

Our county doesn't either, no fiber running through this county or several counties around us for that matter. But , there is a promise by the city council that Fiber Optics would be run though several counties (including Perry Co.) by 2017 -18 in hopes to bring jobs and new business to the area.

It's been a long time coming, right now as it stands there are three maybe four sources of internet service here, Windstream, TVS Cable, Mobile Wifi from AT&T and if you live in town, Time Warner Cable. Time Warner offers speeds of 50 Mbps for close to $80 a month.

AT&T is the only game in town for mobile phone and internet service, there are variations to AT&T here but in the end it's all run by AT&T and their vendor is Appalachian Wireless unless you decide to deal with paying online directly.

I have had a bad experience with Windstream after moving here three years ago, i would never go back to that company again. Technician thought he was dealing with your average Joe Shmoe here and connected his spectrum analyzer to our phone box, only trouble is he disconnected our phone box from the grid so that his gear would show a dead line with no noise issues, which is why i asked them to come out in the first place, DSL needs a quiet enviroment (clean phone lines) in order to work. 

He leaves telling me everything should be working fine, i pick up the phone after he left and call Windstream back, this time the line was a party line with noise that sounded like lightning crashes on AM Radio and several people talking in the back ground.

Needless to say, customer service had to ask me if there was another phone i could call back on, i said no but when i am in town again, i will be asking their office to turn it all off and some how she heard that part clear as day lol

These problems we are having here are partly due to the terrain and poor management on at the cable company. TVS Cable is based out of Hindman,Ky which is 30 miles away, they have a cable head in Hazard,Ky which feeds the cable out to my area and around the county so it's amazing they are able to offer any service with such diverse terrain to work with.

By the way, still having trouble with my connection lol go figure.

Barry of BBR Yardwide

I knew a woman from the phone part lines like Hotel California and Graffiti that lived in Murray, Ky. She and her roomate had the worst service (just like your mentioned Berry). I could sometimes hear crashes and crackles in her line and other people talking. She said she’d call and apparently the lines had faulty isolation on them. The phone company that she had would get it working better (for a while) until the next rain came. Sometimes when I’d call her I’d hear the line ring ½ ring and then all I heard was crackling and a whine that went from high to low followed by more loud crackles.

I’m sure because your in such a rural area the cable and phone company really could care less since there are very few folks out there so a customer or two that they may lose is far better for them since they don’t have to call out a truck roll. But what about folks that can’t get good cell phone service (Even Verozon or AT&T)? Verizon is about the best thing in the nation for rural areas and AT&T is a quick second which also includes prepaid carriers like Cricket Wireless which uses AT&T towers/backbone for their service. You can forget T-Mobile and for heaven sake don’t even think Sprint will work in a rural area lol. I have to laugh every time I hear the only 1% difference lie I hear from those jokers. In what state Kansas? Who knows.

T-Mobile has gotten a lot better over the years, my wife has them and her coverage is the same as my AT&T. In my location T-Mob will piggyback on the AT&T system if the phone loses the T-Mobile signal. I think in some other areas it'll tag along the Verizon and other providers.

Verizon has gotten completely out of the copper and land buisness selling most of it to Frontier Communications. Verizon is strictly wireless now which likely means their network will only get better and hopefully cheaper, at the moment they are the most expensive.

Sprint has always seemed to struggle, I think it used to have something to do with their frequency range being less desirable. (Maybe too high? I can't remember, used to be an issue with Verizon too I think before they expanded)

Undoubtedly the best wireless carriers in terms of coverage are Verizon and AT&T in that order. Funny you mention Kansas, when I lived there the only carrier worth a damn was Verizon. AT&T had huge holes and only Edge service in much of the state.

In Elizabeth City, NC Tmobile was only able to give you 2G data service and this was at the end of 2015. I tried different phones and others have said the same thing that their Data was horrible.

The signal faded long before Hertford and would not even work in Edenton either. AT&T did cover most of Elizabeth City and offered pretty good Data speeds on their cellular service. Cricket (Which uses AT&T) worked pretty well except again in Edenton where there seems to be a few drop outs.

Verizon is very clear their and their Data works the best. They still have Data limits which causes lots of suffering.