The REAL Hawaii Roadrunner Network Status Page

Deceptive

Roadrunner Hawaii - What Support?

The Roadrunner Hawaii Support section has a banner advertisement promising less than one hour response to e-mail support requests:

Wednesday, Jan 10, 2001 : 5:00AM service working [what they call] normally. 5:12AM all connectivity (except to neighborhood users on same gateway) lost. I do traces and can see the problem. 5:21AM - Call Sun Cablevision "support". Third-party answering service. Take message - mumbles something about paging someone. 5:24 AM Call Oceanic NOC (625-8212) - answering machine "we'll be in tomorrow morning at 8."

5:37AM - Go online via dial-up & access Roadrunner E-Mail Support form with "guaranteed" <1 hour response. 5:40AM - send e-mail including trace information which pinpoints trouble.

(At 6:45AM the trouble was cleared; and at 6:54AM, someone on cellular phone from the "cable company" called to tell me it should be OK now. As I write this at 9:30AM (almost 4 hours later) e-mail support responseROAD RUNNER IS TOTALLY DOWN AGAIN at 8:01AM - I'm back on dial-up. 8:20AM - Back up again, but inter-island link to local servers showing high latency (130ms).

Consider: Sun Cablevision, Kailua-Kona is an affiliate of Oceanic Cable, Oahu - both are owned by Time-Warner. Oceanic is a Roadrunner franchisee. They pay ServiceCo-LLC - Roadrunner (partially owned by Time-Warner) fees and in return are provided certain services like the "less than 1 hour e-mail support response". This is clearly bogus. They don't even have a robot automated reply to your inquiry.

If I were on Oahu and had an outage, the only phone number to call - 625-8212 - is a machine, and the only option is to leave a message for them when they come in at 8AM "tomorrow". [This is a toll-call for me.]

My local Roadrunner phone contact is Sun Cablevision which uses the same number for cable TV and Internet support and sales (329-2418). This office is only open 8AM - 5PM, and uses a third-party answering service with real people, and a cat, to take calls after hours. This real person has to make a decision whether to page someone on-call. In this case, she did, and the problem was corrected about an hour and a half after it started. This is truly exceptional for this operation, and I feel very lucky today!

I can pinpoint the time of failure as I was doing a trace when it started (occurred halfway through):

And then:

This is a trace done from working dial-up connection with another provider to West Hawaii Roadrunner gateway:

===================================================
=== VisualRoute report  on 10-Jan-01 6:17:52 AM ===
===================================================

Report for 24.165.35.1

Analysis: The routing loop (24.25.225.157 / 24.25.225.158)
in network "ServiceCo LLC - Road Runner" starting in hops 8-9 is not
allowing IP packets to get to their destination.

9:23AM - Maybe I'm not so lucky today. Service "working", but only "sort-of" - the Interisland Link - hop 5 with latency as high as 671ms is where trouble begins; then add packet loss, and you've got a worse-than-28.8k modem connection:

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