Here is a rant about Time Warner/Charter/Spectrum or whatever the heck they call themselves these days. It illustrates how this large company can have a huge negative impact on a small business, and why treating Internet providers as common carriers is so important.
Our company wouldn’t exist without the Internet. Outside of the fact that our products are mainly used to monitor Internet resources, we host a number of servers from our office and about half of the staff works remotely so we rely on the Internet to communicate and coordinate.
Back in 2012 I contracted with Time Warner to provide Internet access to our office. We had fiber to the building and while our service was considerably more expensive than coax, I liked the fact that it was symmetrical and expandable. We started of with 20 Mbps but soon increased that to 50 Mbps. Over five years we only had one outage, due to a misconfiguration of our Customer Premise Equipment (CPE), and they corrected it within 20 minutes. I love the fact that when you called in the person who answered the phone understood terms like “duplex” and they were always very helpful.
Note the scenario: happy customer who is happy paying a premium for enterprise-level service.
Now let me tell you why all that goodwill has gone away.
Earlier this year we decided to move our office from Pittsboro, NC to Apex, NC. The first thing I did was contact Time Warner (well, Charter at the time) to insure that they could provide fiber to the new location. They said they could, although it would take 45 to 60 days. As our new office space needed to be completed, we were targeting an April 1st move in date anyway, so on February 15th I placed the order for the new service. At best, it would be available on the 1st and at worst it would be ready by the 15th. We told the old landlord we’d be out by April 30th just in case and to give us more time to move.
Finally, Spectrum doubled our speed and cut the price in half. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing.
The feeling didn’t last.
As we got closer to April, things started to go wrong, most of it due to the fact that Spectrum is now such a behemoth that they have no idea what they are doing. In order to get fiber into our new building, they needed what is called a “Right of Entry”. They sent it to our landlord who promptly completed the form and sent it back. However, that person didn’t let the project manager know the form had been received, so he did absolutely nothing. Ten days (!) later I get a note that our build out had been suspended because of the lack of the ROE form. A form, I should point out, that was sent to them, twice.
At the end of March I’m told that our new date is May 11th. I’m unhappy – due to their poor processes I now have a new office that I can’t use for six weeks (remember, we took possession and started paying rent on April 1st). We also had to be out of the old office by the end of April. Luckily I work with a great team that is able to be productive when working from home, so I decided to suck it up and live with it.
On April 12th I get an update – the new date for the end of construction is now May 15th due to processes within Spectrum taking too long to finalize the work with a contractor. Now the actual date we’ll have Internet has been pushed out to the week of May 29th.
I am livid. By this point I’m ready to switch to the other option, AT&T. Unfortunately, they also need 45 to 60 days for service installation so I realize at this point I’m stuck with Spectrum.
I ask my salesperson for options and he suggests we get coax installed for a month (for a fee, of course). Since our office is right next to a large housing development they can get coax in the following week. I sign off on it.
It didn’t happen. When May arrived some of us started working in the new office mooching off the neighbor’s Wi-Fi from AT&T (with permission of course). I ended up traveling for a couple of weeks so I completely forgot about the coax option (it’s not like Spectrum was keeping me updated on anything – I’d have to reach out to them for an update). I did get a note on May 10th that all construction had been completed for the fiber and another note on May 18th that our new install date was June 2nd.
(sigh)
So, 45 days late, we have a firm install date. Wonderful.
Imagine how I felt when on the 24th of May I received a note that more construction was needed and that it would be pushed out another 30 days at least. When I get extremely angry I refer to it as going “non-linear” as that how fast my blood pressure rises. As I was ranting to pretty much everyone I’d ever interacted with at Spectrum it dawned on me that this could be for the coax order. Turns out that was the case. Apparently our crack project manager on the coax side decided to route our service from a point several miles away instead of from the one nearly across the street. This is why it was delayed and why the construction was needed. By this time we are about a week out from having fiber so I canceled the order. I did get a very apologetic call from the coax salesperson which I appreciated (under Spectrum, fiber [Enterprise] is handled by one sales team and coax [Business] is handled by another), and I made it clear that I’d be okay with everything as long as the fiber was delivered as promised on the 2nd.
It was. Around noon on June 2nd we had our 100 Mbps service and on the 3rd we moved all of our devices from the old office in Pittsboro to the new one in Apex. I informed my salesperson that they could disconnect the old service and despite all of the problems, I was happy with the new service.
So the whole process cost me two months rent and a few years off my life, but it was finally over.
Not so fast – the other shoe fell today.
I get an e-mail that I need to confirm my disconnect request. That didn’t bother me, in fact I appreciated it, but what did bother me was an additional note that it would be done within 30 days. When I replied I asked for clarification – would I be *paying* for the service I wasn’t using until they could disconnect it? The answer was “yes”.
I experienced a new word – apoplectic.
Due to the fact that the bureaucracy behind the new merged Spectrum company is so bad, I’m out nearly ten thousand dollars. That is the real money – it’s probably cost us twice that again in lost productivity from lack of network access and dealing with them throughout this process. We’re not one of those companies that is too big to fail so this really impacts us negatively. Had it been explained to me that I’d have to pay for the service until it was disconnected, I would have put the disconnect order in a month ago, but then had I used the date I was originally promised, our servers would have been off-line for over a month. That would have been catastrophic to our company.
Finally, I’ve gone from a happy customer to an extremely pissed off one who will be actively looking for options. Based on my experience I would suggest any business looking for network access look elsewhere.
Access to the Internet has become as important as other utilities such as electricity, water and sewer and just like those utilities it needs to be regulated as one. This is why the decision by the new industry-picked head of the FCC to reverse the decision to classify Internet access under Title II as a “common carrier” is so devastating to businesses like mine. Our company is small, yet we put millions of dollars into the local economy each year. You multiply that by the number of other small businesses and it can have a great impact to any community. Barriers put up by companies like Spectrum demonstrate that they can’t self-regulate and the government needs to take a firmer hand (and this is coming from a left-leaning libertarian).
I will be protesting that final bill for Internet access and I would welcome any advice on how to deal with a company like Spectrum. Let’s hope that there is a change soon so that other businesses can focus on creating value and not have to deal with the crap we had to endure.
I’m not holding my breath.