Road Runner - the Wyle E. Coyote way
Written: Feb 20 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Ease of Use: |
 |
|
| Connection Reliability: |
|
|
| Quality of Tech Support: |
 |
|
|
Pros: High-Speed, almost always on, widely availible, exploitable!
Cons: Tech support lies consistently, initial setup fee, can get slow at peak times.
The Bottom Line: If you need high speed access RoadRunner is one way to go. If you have questions about it, email me and ask.
|
|
|
| joshtiner's Full Review: Road Runner (includes MediaOne) |
Road Runner. You've seen the advertisements, and by now you've heard the tales. Some people swear by it, and others who have had it really hate it. First let's go over what to expect:
You call Time Warner and tell them that you want the service. Well, this is where the fun generally begins. Usually you will be told that a technician will come out to do your "professional install" about two weeks from the date you call. Ridiculous! Why such a long turn around time? Well, mostly because everyone wants RR. Everyone wants RR because they have all heard that it beats dial-up hands down, and let's face it, even on it's worst day RR does beat dial-up ISPs hands down. For the money it really is only a few dollars more in most cases than a dial-up ISP and a second phone line. RR claims that it is 50 times faster than a dial-up connection. So a dial-up is 53.3Kbps, times 50 that's, 266.5Kbps. Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but it really isn't that fast. You can expect someone along the lines of 100.0Kbps though on most downloads from most major sites (such as download.com, fileplanet.com, and many other big name sites), and superb connections if you plan to engage in some online gaming, or download multimedia files such as mp3s or streaming videos.
Why does RR get slow? Smply because the poeople closest to you in your geographic vicinity (those darn neighbors!) and yourself are all sharing the same connectivity point, this is where traffic can get bottlenecked and connections can get ugly. This means if you live next to a sixteen year old kid who is heavy into gaming, mp3s, and well...adult entertainment - you can expect a relatively slow connection during peak hours (or when he is home to say the least). However, RR is making attempts from what I understand to combat this, by setting caps on the speed of bandwidth that any one modem can receive that any one time can help reduce the stress on the connectivity point, and thus be a bit more fair to everyone in the neighborhood. This may or may not be true, but this is just my understanding from a local RR technician.
Which brings us to yet another problem with RR, lies! LIES! There is nothing worse than a technician who tries to lie his way out of a situation in my opinion. I've caught RR techs in so many lies, the most common one is "oh, it must be the site that you are downloading from". That is the stock answer you are given when you call in to complain about crappy service. Take it from me, a veteran tech, I know when a problem originates at my workstation, at the ISP level, or at at the remote site level - I've caught these people telling so many lies I don't even call them any more unless I need hardware replaced (ie, the cable modem itself).
Cable modems are reasonably priced in my opinion. However, if you want to connect more than one machine in your household RR requests that you pay $10 for each extra machine (actually each extra IP), I would definitely suggest purchasing the Netgear RT-314 Internet Gateway Router. In laymens terms, this will "trick" RR into thinking that you only have one machine connected to RR, which in actuality you can have up to 254 using the router. Not only that, you can use file / printer sharing and all sorts of other goodies at high speed.
Road Runner is really great! But I do feel sorry for the laymen when they call in to get technical support, because in most cases you will wind up with an obsessive compulsive liar, or the tech call will end up being the blind leading the blind.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 40.00
Version Number or Year: Been using it since 1997.
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
joshtiner
|
|
Location: Palm Harbor, FL, USA
Reviews written: 7
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Young IT professional with a knack for knowing what's cool and what's not.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.