Time Warner Cable Internet sucks rocks

Time Warner cable bought out my local company, Adelphia, last year, and since then the service has gone straight down the toilet. I'm in the middle of my fourth outage in six months, and for the fourth time in a row, Warners is insisting that the problem is with my cable modem. The last three times, it turned out to be a system outage. I'm sure it will turn out to be a system outage this time, too.

But Time Warner won't look into the problem — instead, as before, they insist on waiting two days while they get a service van out to look at my modem, verify that yup, once again, it hasn't spontaneously stopped working, and then they'll investigate at their end.

When I called Time Warner, they offered to fix the problem faster if I'd pay for "business service," then when I balked at paying extra money for the privilege of getting the service I'm paying them for, they started telling lies, saying that cable modem is always faster than DSL (it isn't), and that Time Warner is the only company that doesn't charge for sending out technicians on service calls (they aren't).

Time Warner cable is like some kind of throwback to the early days of broadband, when it was rare and exotic and barely worked. They have a well-deserved reputation for buying out great ISPs and turning them to garbage, and that's just what they've done here. I'm sick of it.

Do you work at an LA-based ISP? I need broadband service — something fast and reliable I can use from now until September when I go back to London. Drop me some email.

Update: Well, Time Warner got service running again this morning (surprise, surprise, the problem was at their end, not mine, AGAIN, knock me over with a feather, honestly), and I had a couple hundred emails suggesting alternate ISPs. Of these the ones that seem promising are:

Speakeasy
Sonic
LABridge