Recent Time Warner Cable Behavior

Since last month's Time Warner Cable problems with their DNS I have been experiencing repeated loss of internet connection. Each time it happens I see that my modem is rebooting. It happened at least twice yesterday, and just happened again a few minutes ago. So I broke down and called TW.

This time I did NOT get the pre-recorded message about chronic outages in the Desert Cities. I got right through to a customer service agent who went off for a minute to "run some diagnostics on my modem" and came back and reported no problem. I asked, but he did not answer, if they were still having problems with their DNS. He asked if my computer were wired directly to the modem. When I said it was not, he asked if it was wireless. I'm pretty sure those are the only two possibilities: wired or wireless, unless the third possibility is "Computer? I don't have a computer."

He said the only way we could diagnose this would be for me to wire directly to the modem and wait for it to happen again so we could tell if it was a problem with my router! I asked how it could be possible for a router to reboot my modem. He said he had never heard of such a thing, but he had heard of crazier things happening. I told him that I knew of only two ways to make the modem reboot: either I could unplug the power and then plug it back in, or they could send a signal from their end. I said I had never heard of a router or computer on the customer's end rebooting the modem. Then he offered to schedule a technican's visit. This was the first time I was ever able to call "bullshit" on a TW Cable customer service agent and get him to actually back down. He did not seem happy, but the technician is coming Monday morning.

If things follow the usual path, the Monday morning technician will not have heard of any DNS problem, will see problems with my connection, will not be able to fix them, but will suggest something silly like removing the UPS, and then he'll schedule a visit from the guys-who-actually-fix-things and then we'll all find out what the problem is.