I have subscribed to Time Warner in Raleigh/Durham for 12 years and in the last 2 of those 12 years I have never been so dis-satisfied in my life! Here is the problem I have encountered and the response I received.
I have owned an Exployer 3250HD box for two years now. A few of the problems I have with this box are as follows. When changing channels there are a couple of channels that I can be watching and when I try to use the guide or change to another channel the box will just lock up and can take from anywhere between 10 seconds and 1 minute to respond to a command. This is really noticable on channel 38. The other problem I have is the signal will drop and you will see black squares on the television not to mention the popping in the sound even though I am using the optical digital out.
A few weeks ago I purchased a 37" LCD television for the bedroom. At the same time I exchanged my old non-HD box that was in the bedroom for one of the new Exployer 4250HD boxes. I installed the 4250HD box in the living room theater system and took the old 3250HD box to the bedroom. The 3250HD box does pretty much the same thing in the bedroom that it did in the living room so I won't go back in to that. The 4250HD box that they gave me was brand new and did not work at all. No boot, nothing. I took this box back and exchanged it for another. This box was used and booted but the HDMI output had a short and you would loose picture/sound unless you held the cable in a certain way. I took this box back and exchanged it for another and got home and it boots and everything works but this is where the fun begins.
I still have the same signal issues that I was having with the 3250HD box but now about every couple of days I get a message telling me my television does not support the output resolution of the box and that I need to switch the output. Yet, short of the signal issues the picture works fine. My television supports the 1080p, 1080i, 720p formats so I am pretty sure this is a bug in the box, probably firmware. The stupid thing is the picture is working behind the nag box but the only way to get rid of the nag is to re-boot the box! What a PITA!
To make a long story short, tech service has no answer and all they want to do is come out and swap the box. Like I have four hours to kill once a week for some idiot to come out and tell me the box is bad. I am pretty sure the issue has to do with something in the neighborhood but for the last two years they have blamed everything but that! It is always a bad box, or bad cable in the house even though I have installed Monster Cable RG-6 quad shield throughout the home to replace the existing so called "bad lines". This is no lie but on one call last year I actually had the tech stop by and drop off a box telling me his son had a ball game that he wanted to attend and that I could just swap the box but that he would have to come back later to check the cables. This was after taking off one half of a day at work and waiting until 5 pm for him to show! I am finished with them.
On Friday I suscribed to Dish Network and figure I will give that a try. I have never had service with them but I can't imagine it being worse than the service I have received from Time Warner. I'm just courious to know if anyone else here has had this problem and if so what did it take to make it right? I forgot to mention I have Roadrunner and it works great.
