Time Warner Cable - there are better choices

I had SBC Yahoo DSL for quite a while. It had its quirks, but by and large it wasn't so bad. Speed was decent, it mostly stayed up, and their service was a coupla steps above "sucks".

In February 2008 my bride and I went for the Time Warner 3-in-one pitch -- Internet access with 2 GB mailboxes, cable TV, and even phone service over the internet. The price sounded good, the service promises were stellar, and we would get movies and TV channels that we currently were not getting.

Well, after everything was installed and set up, it turned out that Time Warner was not the best choice we could have made.

The first issue was the mailbox size. Instead of the 2 GB promised - and listed on their website - we got a piddly little 10 megabyte mailbox because we were in some kind of Adelphia transition area. It filled up VERY quickly, then all other email messages got rejected until I emptied it.

We were assured that this was going to change very, very soon, but as of September 2008 it's still the same puny mailbox. I wrote letters to corporate and found out that they were NOT going to do anything about it, so I started forwarding all my email to Gmail. Then, I realized that there is really no need for me to use a Time Warner account at all, so I started changing all my email contacts - business and personal - to Gmail. Works fine, never a problem, and my Roadrunner mailbox never goes over the limit because everything forwards automatically.

The second and more disturbing issue is the cable modem. This runs both my internet access and my home telephone. The modem seems to restart itself sometimes for no particular reason. When this happens, both phone and internet access go down. If I'm on a phone call, it gets dropped. This seems to be happening more and more frequently of late, so I'm going to call them and give them one chance to fix it. If they can't, then I'll be going back to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) with a DSL internet connection. The TV will get a Dish Network connection.

At least I won't have all my eggs in one basket, and if there's a major earthquake I'll stand a better chance of having phone service. And I won't have crappy Time Warner service.