[TriLUG] OT: Time Warner Biz Class Mayhem

[Ken M]

This might not be a helpful or constructive answer but in the end I have
found TWC to be an absolute nightmare to deal with in regards to
customer support.  So few of their staff have any real knowledge other
than upselling.  Their phone and ticket system barely works and it seems
their staff can't even do basic math.  I was told by someone that it
would take 12 days for something to take effect and then they told me it
would be a week.  I proceeded to tell her that there were 7 days in a
week and then she insisted no they use calendar days not business days.

I am pretty convinced that when someone drops out of high school or gets
a serious head trauma that is their ticket into TWC customer support.

Like I said this is not constructive but the only time I ever had a
worse customer service is when I caught a collector on my fathers estate
committing outright fraud...

Ken

On Tue, 2014-02-25 at 08:22 -0500, Scott Chilcote wrote:
> Hello LUGers,
> 
> <tl;dr warning \>
> 
> Some of you may recall that I was searching for an alternative ISP last
> month, because my company requested that I obtain separately billed
> internet service and static IP for my home office.  TWCBC won that
> decision, and they completed the installation in late January.
> 
> Starting up with their service has not been as trouble free as I'd
> hoped, but I will focus on a problem that affects the Ubee
> modem-firewall-router that they installed.
> 
> In the three weeks or so it has been running, it has somehow changed its
> own settings on two occasions. 
> 
> As the TWC installer made clear when it was provided, I am not permitted
> access to this device.  I can look at its status page on the network,
> but they do not provide an account and password.  I need to call TWCBC
> to make any configuration changes.
> 
> As with previous ISPs, I performed a search on the Ubee's model number
> and found that it has two levels of accounts.  These are user and
> admin.  I also found that the basic user level account is easy to find
> online, and TWC does not generally seem to care if people access it.  I
> tried it and was able to log into the device and look through its
> settings.  It was working well, so I went along with TWCBC's restriction
> and left it alone.
> 
> Fast forward two weeks, and one Thursday evening we noticed that our
> wifi devices were no longer able to reach websites.  At first it seemed
> like a problem with Time Warner's nameservers.  But after some
> investigation I found that the Ubee's DHCP service was not providing
> nameserver addresses anymore.  I tried manually adding a nameserver IP
> into my laptop's config, and it fixed the problem.  But the next time it
> connected to wifi it was deleted again.
> 
> I tried looking at the Ubee device's configuration to see what had
> happened, and discovered that the user account was locked out.   So I
> called TWCBC's technical support.  It took several calls over a day and
> a half to get this addressed*.  What they wound up doing was resetting
> the device to its factory settings and restoring the original configuration.
> 
> I won't belabor the details, but this didn't restore everything.  For
> one, it disabled PPTP passthrough, which kept me from being able to use
> my company's VPN until well into the next afternoon.  It also didn't
> restore the user account access, which meant that I had no visibility
> into the device's settings.  I understand why they want to do this, but
> it makes helping a less than perfectly knowledgeable level 2 support rep
> figure out why it isn't working a lot more difficult.
> 
> I wound up "fixing" the whole problem by asking them to put the Ubee
> device in bridged mode, and turn off its radio.  Then I went to Intrex
> and bought the TP-Link box with the most antennas and biggest numbers,
> and set it down next to Ubee.  Within 20 minutes I had wifi and VPN
> working, and made plans to flash it with one one of the WRT firmwares in
> the near future.
> 
> But Ubee wasn't done yet.  Less than a day later our wifi failed again. 
> Android devices were complaining about unreliable connections.  I tried
> the Android wifi analyzer app, and found that a strong new wifi signal
> had appeared right on top of the one from our new TP-Link box.  Its SSID
> had the same model number as the TWC Ubee appliance.  I went down and
> had a look, and sure enough the Ubee's blue WLAN light was shining. 
> WTF?  It was definitely shut off the day before.
> 
> So it was back on the phone to TWCBC support to get it turned off
> again.  While I was talking to TWCBC's rep I asked about how their
> device got reconfigured.  Twice.  He didn't know.  Does Time Warner send
> out periodic updates?  "No."  I asked if it could be defective.  This
> seemed fairly possible since it was well used when installed.  It has
> dings and scratches, and smells a bit like burning silicon.  But he said
> "NO!" before I finished asking, making me wonder if this happens much. 
> According to him, the main possibility is user tampering.  My wife and
> our cats deny this.  Neither of our neighbors seem capable of cracking WPA2.
> 
> So why does their Ubee device have a mind of its own?  It passes its
> self tests.  I can run these online from my time warner account.  My
> only guesses are that either they do update it periodically and are
> lying about it, or that script kiddies have figured out how to access
> its WAN side config interface and are having their way. 
> 
> Does anyone have any insight to lend?
> 
> Thanks for any clues,
> 
>   Scott C.
> 
> ________________
> * Part of my curse with TWC is that we had residential service for five
> years with them, up until 2009.  I made the mistake of giving them our
> home phone number when I signed up for business class last month.  For
> unknown reasons their customer service voicemail system only recognizes
> our old residential service, so when I call them I get tossed back and
> forth between business class customer service and residential tech
> support.  I have complained about this every time I call, and every time
> they say "It's fixed now!"  And the next time I call, it's time for
> another round!
> 
> -- 
> Scott Chilcote
> Cary, NC USA
> scottchilcote at att.net
>