Time Warner Cable
In the communications business, dropping traffic is just not acceptable. Our local Time Warner office began to offer high speed internet service 3 years ago. Since that time, most of us have noticed a steady decline in their quality of service. This article explains why this is happening.
In the communications business, it is customary to over-sell your infrastructure by a given percentage. This is generally harmless, and does not affect the quality of your service. It is simply a mathematical way to allocate the resources. For example: If your infrastructure can handle ten simultaneous internet connections, and you sell fifteen subscriptions, you are 150% over-sold. You do this knowing that all fifteen of your customers will never be actively using their connection at the same time. In theory, if half of your subscribers are connected at any given time, you would have 7.5 active connections, using 75% of your resources, while you are 150% over-sold. Simple enough.
Here's where things start to break down. In order to avoid dropping traffic during routine maintenance, you will need twice the infrastructure required by your active traffic. In the above example, we had 75% active traffic. In order to avoid dropping this traffic during maintenance, there must be enough extra infrastructure to handle that traffic, while maintenance is being preformed, or a failed component is being replaced. This is referred to as redundancy. It is perfectly fine to be 150% oversold with 75% active traffic, as long as you have the redundancy needed to handle that active traffic. Enough of the math.
The problem, in a nut shell, is that the infrastructure's redundancy is being sold to subscribers, leaving no option but to drop traffic during maintenance, and no way to handle component failure without dropping traffic. In the big city, dropping traffic is a big deal. Questions are asked, paperwork is filled out, and quite often, someone gets fired.
Our local Time Warner Office will fail to satisfy their commitment to their customers, until they meet the redundancy requirement for their active traffic. Any time something goes wrong, and any time they perform maintenance, your connection will fail, and you will get a bill as if Time Warner's commitment to you has been met. Complain, and you will be told "it's down because we are making it better". This will continue until you folks convince Time Warner to take Del Rio's communication needs seriously.
The revenue generated by your cable bills - as far as Time Warner's decision making process is concerned - is not significant enough to warrant the allocation of necessary infrastructure to handle their commitment to you, their customer. In other words, the money you give them is not enough to cause them to provide the level of service that a larger market would get.
Remember when our Wal-Mart was too small? Same problem, different service. The only way to fix it is to go to Time Warner corporate - en mass - and throw a fit. Complaining locally will not solve the problem. In fact, corporate is likely ignoring requests by our local TW administration, for increased infrastructure. |