Time Warner Cable Business Class Still Not Ready For Small Business Prime-Time

Time Warner Cable Business Class continues to make headway in the ISP business market, especially for small business – but fails in some key areas. Although its service is reliable, it appears weak against its competitors when extended features are compared. The service may be immature in its life cycle development.In some cases TWC Business Class continues to act against the interests of its very own customers and ultimately against its own moniker by putting its own needs first. Although the Time Warner Cable Business Class moniker is “You First. The Technology Follows”, its apparent actions care to differ.

Often playing second fiddle to Verizon Business FIOS, the Time Warner Cable Business Class (TWCBC) service continues to pump away at media promotions to encourage business owners to switch to their ISP service to theirs, but the facts are that the service may be sub-par and the whole product may have been poorly designed for small business.

Time Warner Cable Receives The Normal Background Hum That All Major ISP’s Face

The complaints against the Time Warner Business product are the same as any large ISP receives and have included; less-than-stellar support, poor communication with clients, long phone support wait times, false and misleading statements about the internet speed that can be expected, internal policies that create havoc with client accounts, poor accounting leading to additional administration and an overall half-baked technology that isn’t really keeping up with the Jones’s.Specifically, it’s not keeping up with the Verizon Jones’s.

Two Of The Biggest Problems Facing TWCBC

Two particularly frustrating problems that have been experienced by TWC business users are the internal Time Warner policies that stop their customers from performing normal B2B operations and the lack of a dedicated firewall.

Time Warner Policy and Practices Create Hurdles For Their Customers

Time Warner has adopted a B2B business practice that is causing a negative ripple effect throughout the internet community – the practice is that Time Warner Cable Business Class service refuses to publish their customer (or client names) in the ARIN (American Registry of Internet Numbers) database, even when their clients actually request that this be done. This causes damage to B2B relations between businesses as business owners that use TWC Business cannot prove what IP address they are using to other companies they want to trade with – trust cannot be established because TWC will not provide client data on the ARIN database entry. This self-inflicted problem is akin to some of the Six Sigma problems that corporations can often experience when it comes to change and dealing with new partners.

TWC Is The Only Business ISP To Adopt This Practice

Time Warner is unique in being the only ISP on the block that refuses to publish this data and they continue to stick to the antiquated policy – this also causes havoc for firewall administrators who try to analyze their web server data, but find that Time Warner Cable Business Class is the “name of record” on every IP address account in ARIN, thus destroying all value of weblogs. Also Time Warner Cable Business Class customers cannot prove their ownership of a specific IP address to another company that they might want to do business with, so firewall rules cannot be set up to allow exchange of data in a protected environment, which would normally be done for B2B.

Political Move or Just Plain Error?

This policy may be political by Time Warner Cable, as they probably don’t want their list of clients to be publically available, allowing accounts to be poached by competitors, but this blinkered approach only further frustrates their existing business client base that cannot actually get any B2B business done due to the antiquated TWC policies of self-interest. When a company makes a policy decision purely for their own self-interest, clearly their top down approach is not “Client First”. The fact that Time Warner Cable Business Class doesn’t publish the organization or customer name in the ARIN database is, at best , frustrating or, at worst, damaging to US businesses.

Example of Poor IP Registration By TWC in the ARIN Database

Below is an example of an ARIN database entry that TWCBC has annoyingly anonymized, even though the client has requested that their public IP address be correctly registered to them in the Cust-Name, Org-Name or Organization field. The customer is Morgan Stanley, but you would never know it from the ARIN record that Time Warner has published. No other ISP does this and its incredibly frustrating to everyone concerned, how does Morgan Stanley prove to another company that this is their IP address?

ARIN Registry Entry Information For IP Address 50.74.48.82

IP Location:

United States New York City Time Warner Cable Internet Llc

ASN:

AS12271 SCRR-12271 – Time Warner Cable Internet LLC (registered Jun 09, 2000)

Resolve Host:

rrcs-50-74-48-82.nyc.biz.rr.com

IP Address:

50.74.48.82

Whois Server

whois.arin.net
NetRange: 50.74.0.0 – 50.75.255.255
CIDR: 50.74.0.0/15
OriginAS:
NetName: RCNY
NetHandle: NET-50-74-0-0-1
Parent: NET-50-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
RegDate: 2011-01-04
Updated: 2011-01-04
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-50-74-0-0-1

OrgName: Time Warner Cable Internet LLC
THE PROBLEM IS HERE – ITS MISSING THE CLIENT INFORMATION
OrgId: RCNY
Address: 13820 Sunrise Valley Drive
City: Herndon
StateProv: VA
PostalCode: 20171
Country: US
RegDate: 2001-09-26
Updated: 2013-04-25
Comment: Allocations for this OrgID serve Road Runner commercial customers out of the
New York City, NY and Syracuse, NY RDCs.
Ref: http://whois.arin.net/rest/org/RCNY

ReferralServer: rwhois://ipmt.rr.com:4321

OrgAbuseHandle: ABUSE10-ARIN
OrgAbuseName: Abuse
OrgAbusePhone: +1-703-345-3416
OrgAbuseEmail: abuse@rr.com
OrgAbuseRef: http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/ABUSE10-ARIN

OrgTechHandle: IPTEC-ARIN
OrgTechName: IP Tech
OrgTechPhone: +1-703-345-3416
OrgTechEmail: abuse@rr.com
OrgTechRef: http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/IPTEC-ARIN

== Additional Information From rwhois://ipmt.rr.com:4321 ==

%rwhois V-1.5:0020b0:00 ipmt.rr.com (by Time Warner Cable, Inc. V-1.0)
network:Class-Name:network
network:ID:NETBLK-ISRC-50.74.0.0-15
network:Auth-Area:50.74.0.0/15
network:Org-Name:Road Runner Commercial
network:Tech-Contact:ipaddreg@rr.com
network:Updated:2013-07-18 10:39:33
network:IP-Network:50.74.0.0/15
network:Admin-Contact:IPADD-ARIN
network:IP-Network-Range:50.74.0.0 – 50.75.255.255

organization:Class-Name:organization
organization:ID:NETBLK-ISRC-50.74.0.0-15
organization:Auth-Area:50.74.0.0/15
organization:Org-Name:Road Runner Commercial
THE PROBLEM IS HERE – ITS MISSING THE CLIENT INFORMATION, AGAIN!
organization:Tech-Contact:ipaddreg@rr.com
organization:Street-Address:13820 Sunrise Valley Drive
organization:City:Herndon
organization:State:VA
organization:Postal-Code:20171
organization:Country-Code:US
organization:Phone:703-345-3151
organization:Updated:2013-07-18 10:39:33
organization:Created:2013-07-18 10:39:33
organization:Admin-Contact:IPADD-ARIN

Jennifer Mosley

Jennifer Mosley has specialized in business analysis since graduating from NYU Stern Business School in 2001. Mosley has become a sought after analyst in the industry. Her writing peers have accused her of spending too much time on Brazilian keratin treatments to tame her unruly locks, but she reminds them that they are misogynist pigs who deserve to be bald. She is currently working on such varied projects as the analysis of the Google corporate breakup and the other important international dilemma between wine or beer shampoo.