A Review of Time Warner's RoadRunner ISP in Columbus, OH

As far as ISP's go, I have tried both dial-up and cable. Currently I have Road Runner through Time Warner in Columbus, OH. Sure, high speed is faster than dial-up when loading pages, surfing the web, and downloading files and programs. But there is also a down side to high speed. Besides the obvious problems, such as more possibilities of intrusion and hacking due to high speed being "on" constantly, there seems to be another problem. I am not sure if this is with Time Warner in general, or if other cable providers face this problem as well, but at least once a week (in the least) I face a total loss of connection. The first time I experienced this problem, I thought it may be a less than adequate cable modem or wireless router that I was using on my home network. Surprisingly, after testing the wireless network connection I found that it was not the equipment but the ISP. I actually had called Time Warner's customer service line and found via recording that there was an outage in the area for Road Runner clients. This seemed to be the case every time the service "went down".

So I began to wonder if having high speed was worth the problems that came with it. Well, since I am a network security professional, the idea of having added intrusion due to my connection always being "on" didn't bother me. By taking some simple steps, it's fairly easy to "lock down" your system. The problem that concerned me the most was the fact that I was losing service connection at least once a week, but normally more. After contacting Time Warner and getting the run around on the problem, they never once offered to deduct anything from our bill to make us happy and keep us as customers. Why would they do this? Because they are the biggest provider in the Columbus area for actual high speed internet service.