After spending hours on the phone, answering the same irrelevant questions over and over, and plugging in different cables, power cycling my modem and PC, answer thrice what operating system I'm running (like that matters), I finally get through to tier two technical support. Voila! I speak to someone who seems to know how to check technical facts regarding the network.

It was not an easy or quick trek. Here's the process.

I call Time Warner Cable (Road Runner Internet) and start my conversation with technical support.

Of course, the first solution is to turn off the cable modem, turn it back on, turn of the computer, turn it back on. Traceroutes or other diagnostic utilities are simply not as important and restarting everything. So, I do as told.

Next, I replace the ethernet cable. Again, a traceroute from the their office to my modem isn't good enough. We must illogically start swapping cables. So, I comply again.

At this point, I am two phonecalls into the process. I still have the following traceroute (MTR) response from the rr.com website (on their own network). This is done with my computer directly connected to their modem, with the new cable as required by technical support.

After 26 minutes on the phone with technical support, I am now escalated to the next level of technical support. I wait on hold another two minutes to receive my confirmation of escalation.

Eventually, a tech ends up at my house (several days later) and we're all involved more than an hour doing traceroutes, watching packets drop, etc. So, it ends with them finding the problem and repairing it, right? Nope. Those of you that have less faith in big oligopolies like Time Warner already know how this ends.

The end result is that the Time Warner rep I'm dealing with feels that it's not really the company's responsibility to stop packet loss, since the only thing we can do to verify we're dropping packets is a ping. The fact that my service consistently stinks is anecdotal and not easily recreated while we're on the phone. He can see dropped packets, and he sees the 80-90% loss just like I do. But, we only create this problem when we run a ping. His position is that ping is a work related feature and therefor not supported on home internet connections (never mind it's something they tell their customers to do when sourcing a problem in their network connection). So, this is a commercial problem. Residential services work fine, since he sees me surfing pages and sees no substantial packet drops.

Yes, this is how my technical support call ends with Time Warner. It may also be of interest to Time Warner customers that he tells me that working from home is specifically not allowed on personal internet connections. I've not found that in their TOS, but it's an interesting point of view. If you need to log into your work server from home, it's not allowed or supported under your TWC agreement (according to this technical support agent). So, if you call TWC to tell them your remote VPN is being blocked, or broken by their service, I'm guessing you'll be told you're not suppose to do commercial activities on your home cable internet connection.

It makes me wonder, am I allowed to go to commercial websites on my TWC connection? Are they supported traffic? Who knows. I just know that if you see 90% packet loss when you ping something, that's service as advertised with TWC according to this technical support agent. I'd like a more official answer from the company, and I'll post it if I receive one.