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A major service outage impacting Road Runner and Digital Phone service from Time Warner Cable began early this morning is ongoing. Customers contacting Time Warner Cable in Maine, New York, and western Massachusetts are being told there is a service outage ongoing with both services, resulting in no dial tone and slow/no Internet service.
Presumably, there is a problem at the Regional Operations Center in Syracuse.
There is no estimated time for service restoration.
Cable television service is not affected.
[Update 2:00pm EST -- Time Warner Cable blamed the outage on a defective router, which we heard was in the Binghamton area. Service was "restored" at 9:45am although we've noticed that meant they shifted traffic onto other regional networks and that was still causing some page loading problems until late in the morning.
The outage was acknowledged on Time Warner Cable's customer service lines in New York, Massachusetts, and Maine. Rochester had the first recorded message up very early this morning, with the others coming by 8:45am.]
[Update 4:36pm EST -- Customers impacted by the outage can obtain one day of Road Runner service credit, but only if you call or write to ask. You can use the online customer form on Time Warner Cable's website for your area or call your local customer service number. The outage began around 5:20am this morning.]
Other stories of interest:
- Road Runner/Digital Phone Outage In Northeast
- Affected by the Time Warner Outage? Get One Day Service Credit
- Triad Region: Time Warner Cable Introduces Road Runner Mobile WiMax on December 1st
- Serious Time Warner Service Outage “Caused Outrage” for Customers
- Time Warner Cable Increasing Road Runner Turbo Speed In South Texas
Looks like it is clearing up. Running engines and systems so big and complex sometimes they need some oil somewhere. And as far as wanting a refund for a few
hours off-line because you could not tell all you little puke friends on
your lame facebook account that you were taking taking a dump
forget it. Go get Frontier. Get a life. Things happen.
Y’know someone could quite possibly have had an emergency requiring a call to 911.
This is why I still have landlines here as well, not just to make DSL cheaper. The telephone companies (Verizon and Frontier) haven’t let me down in terms of reliability for as long as I’ve had them. If service did ever go down due to say a winter storm, it was back up in no time.
This is a somewhat misplaced sense of security. Frontier (or a landline in general) isn’t necessarily any more reliable.
Consider the ways Frontier can fail you:
Consider the ways VoIP can fail you:
The lists look about the same to me. The only way to really be covered is to have a backup or two. Have a pre-paid cell phone if you don’t want a plan. Have a CB radio. Have a calling card and access to a pay phone.
One benefit of VoIP that I’m unaware of as a feature from Frontier or any other traditional POTS line is that if your phone adapter cannot be reached, your VoIP provider can redirect the call to another number you’ve specified, or your calls can be sent to simultaneously ring in multiple places.
Time Warner Digital Phone does not offer the network redirect feature but any provider who is serious about providing VoIP will do that (ViaTalk, Vonage).
We’re at a time when all cell phones have a GPS device in them if for no other reason than to provide location information for E911 calls. Having a land line is not really any safer anymore than a cell phone or a VoIP line at home, especially in bad weather.
P.S. Ironically while I was typing up this reply TWC internet bailed on me again – thankfully I saved what I typed to submit it later when I got to work.
I’m never going to get digital phone from my cable company; I think it’s a hideously bad idea to expose all of one’s major communication options to a single point of failure.
Time for another overuse story by the usual media suspects
Jason you are correct. Electronic phones VOIP do go down. That is why
I stay with my copper. If a cell tower went down your cell phone should
be able to find another tower. If your electric goes off you as dead in
the water as today’s outage. No electric to your modem means no
signal for anything. What was it 7:00 to about 9:30 today they did a
good job figuring it out but people on other blogs were crying they want
credit.
Earl: you are correct to. Single point is a bad idea
Hmm…where have I heard this before?
Oh yeah…
[...] is the second time in three months the company suffered a major phone service outage in its Northeast [...]
I am still experiencing this problem, but now it has progressed to my cable boxes to the point where a bunch of Cable guys have to re-wire the whole area