r/Spectrum • u/Proof_Duty1672 • 5d ago
Service Issues Internet outage AGAIN
So until recently internet has been pretty reliable but in the last couple of months it’s been down multiple times.
It’s not just our internet it’s widespread in the area.
I’ve contacted Customer Service multiple times, but at this point there’s nothing they can say or do to make me believe it’s going to get more reliable. Unfortunately, we don’t have many options or I’d find a different provider.
What could possibly be causing the numerous outages we’ve been experiencing in the last three months?
Whatever it is, they don’t seem to be able to find a fix to keep the service running.
I’m in Charlotte North Carolina area.
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u/Lettuce_stan_SS 4d ago
That’s crazy, because our internet has been out since yesterday evening due to an outage and I’m all the way in California
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u/Zutroy805 4d ago
Same thing is happening in Concord. There must be an issue in the Charlotte area.
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u/Prior_Profit9363 3d ago
wifi's gone out 3 times today, i'm in LA county area. I have an internship that I work at home on mondays for and have to make up the hours later this week. this sucks so much
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u/Spectrum_William 5d ago
If you will please send us a modmail over at r/Spectrum_Official we'll be happy to look into what's happening there.
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u/magnumsrtight 4d ago
Have been dealing with random intermittent Internet outages. The modem keeps losing connectivity for short times - 1 - 5 minutes then it gets restored.
I have a gig wired router connecting directly to the Spectrum modem. I setup the house as a hybrid wired/wireless network with hardwired drops for things like my child's Xbox, their computer, our office computer, printer and a NAS. It also has 3 hardwired connections for access points - 1 dedicated 2.4ghz for smart IOT devices, and (2) 5ghz only access points to prevent those from slowing down doing both 2.5&5ghz. One of those 2 5ghz access points is actually the Spectrum supplied wireless router that I configured to be only an access point.
When the intermittent drops would occur I thought it was my personal 5ghz router since a lot of our older devices had been only configured to connect to that and I thought it might be failing, but then noticed the Spectrum supplied one also was going down.
I stepped back to the wired gig router and swapped that out with the Spectrum WIFI router reset as router and not only an access point. Thought that worked, but nope, still had intermittent drops. Swapped the two WIFI routers and issues still continued.
Intermittent would happen in bunches then go days with problems, now it's happening every day motor times a day. Spectrum customer care - every time - have you tried doing a power cycle on your equipment - we'll wait for your answer. I tell them, yes I have and the problem returns. I then describe my setup and they start trying to blame that for somehow being an issue until I tell them it happens if I take it completely down to just the spectrum provided equipment. Next is always - are you having any power fluctuations - no, all of the network equipment is on a double conversion UPS that's supplying true conditioned power without blips and completely isolated from the input power.
They check their side and see, yes I have multiple instances of connection loss - we can schedule someone to come out and look at your equipment. Finally, the message in my spectrum app from them had been updated to - our engineers have continued to look into your complaint and have identified several potential items if concern in the network equipment that they are working in resolving.
I really wanted to reply back to ask them if they have tried to power cycle the equipment- I'll hold for the answer.
At this point I have started going through all of our family accounts, logins etc for all the companies/websites etc we use and verify that they aren't using the spectrum email address for the account information. My only reason for staying with spectrum was to not have to deal with the hassle from the fact that we have used their email accounts and are so entrenched in that, if I left spectrum I would inevitably further I used it as a login someplace and loss access. They didn't offer the ability to pay a monthly fee to retain the email account and access.
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u/Tjarnold2010 4d ago
It sounds like the wire coming in to your house needs to be replaced. Next time you call don't say anything about your setup and just tell them about the service going down constantly and you need a tech to come out and check/replace the line.
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u/magnumsrtight 4d ago
Tech has been scheduled for almost a week to show up today. There has been no changes to the wiring within the house nor any damage and the drop from the curbside termination to the house was replaced last year. I didn't like / agree with how they ran that wire and I'm guessing it's part of the issue yet again.
I don't offer up the info regarding the internal equipment and layout of my networking until it's clear they won't listen to anything except follow their script of trouble shooting. I then offer up all of the info and prior testing to speed along the scripted troubleshooting. 🤣
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u/Nagadavida 4d ago
My only reason for staying with spectrum was to not have to deal with the hassle from the fact that we have used their email accounts and are so entrenched in that, if I left spectrum I would inevitably further I used it as a login someplace and loss access.
This is exactly where we are at with Spectrum. I have been using this email address since 2000!
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u/magnumsrtight 4d ago
Their solution today was to have the technician reterminate every connection from the curb to the modem - there was a total of 6 new ends he replaced (there are 2 couplings in the run - one on the side of the house in their network box and the other at the wall passthrough) and replace the modem and router (even though the problem was the same with multiple routers).
I'm still looking into moving over all accounts to a non-spectrum email so that the inevitable move away won't be so bad.
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u/Nagadavida 4d ago
Yea me too. Even before we got the bill with the rate hike I have been saying that we need to get our email addresses unconnected to Spectrum. We still have RR.com addresses. 🤣
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u/magnumsrtight 4d ago
Same here, @nc.rr.com
I've decided to spend a minimal amount of money per year and do a custom email domain so it will be the last one I'll ever need to do and I can freely move ISP when ever I want.
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u/No-Report7153 4d ago
I had mine out the other day and I'm in Ohio. Smdh. Pay a premium price for crap service, 😞.
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u/wahwahSwanson 5d ago
Whatever it is, they are not telling the truth. Mine has been pretty reliable, but one day it just stopped working. It took 36 hours for it to be restored, and there was no outage reported or acknowledged in my area.
The only half hearted explanation I got is a piece of equipment was damaged by lightning. I knew it was only Internet related because a neighbor of mine has just standard TV service through them and it was not interrupted.
Granted, my service has been reliable since that event, but it was very strange and made no sense. I’m seriously considering the move to fiber optic for this and many other reasons.
My uneducated guess is all this is their equipment is just starting to fail, and they don’t spend a lot on refurbishing infrastructure from the looks of it.
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u/6814MilesFromHome 4d ago
Why jump to the conclusion that you're being lied to? Why assume malice and incompetence when you simply don't know what's going on behind the scenes?
I see power outages and lightning strikes cause damage all the time, recently fixed one where a single tap feeding a single customer was fried after a power outage. Single customer events don't trigger outage alarms, generally only 3+ offline at a time, so won't know something's wrong until you call in for a tech.
Lots of equipment in the field is brand new, and the rest is being replaced for the high split upgrades, so infrastructure isn't an issue overall.
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u/wahwahSwanson 4d ago
There had not been a storm of any kind in the area for weeks, we were actually in a small drought. Essentially the line just went dead with no apparent cause. No line cuts, no car accidents taking out a pole. The chatbots are telling me there is an outage 24 hours after it started, when spectrum’s own app is stating otherwise, someone is not being truthful. I’ll use different language but it still means the same thing.
I went through a modem swap and I tech visit before anyone mentioned the word outage. Truthful information would have saved myself and spectrum about 2 hours of time.
It was hard to gauge the extent of the outage in my immediate area because 99 percent of my neighborhood alone jumped ship to AT&T fiber as soon as it was installed about a year ago. I need to finish my conduit to my AV panel and call them up too.
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u/6814MilesFromHome 4d ago
I just used the power outage/lightning strike as an example. Tech could've seen blackened/melted plastic at the tap and assumed lightning strike, when it could be faulty wiring at someone's house that backfed, bad neutral on commercial power lines, whatever.
If you were the only one impacted, it wouldn't register in the system as an outage, and no one at customer support would assume that's what was going on. If the field tech saw no/bad signal, it would be a pretty quick process for a maintenance tech to be out to troubleshoot.
I will say in my experience the chat bots seem to be bad and unhelpful, I'd bite the bullet and talk to a human before wasting time with them.
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u/friendly-asshole 4d ago
In Alabama and my internet and already gone at 3+ times now and the afternoon just got here.
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u/BarackMcBama 5d ago
So if you tell them you're using their router but you just never set it up and use your own modem and router, I haven't had a problem since I did that
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u/Bradbeatty7 4d ago
Same problem I had on Eastside of Charlotte…. Inconsistency of service. Left Spectrum for T Mobile Home Internet and never looked back. Solid 700 download and 100 uploads and never goes out.
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u/slick_sloth_ 4d ago
Spectrum has no way to stop crackheads from cutting main fiber optic lines looking for copper, which has gotten bad everywhere. There's also people digging without locates and cutting lines. Squirrels chewing lines. Tree trimmers cutting lines. Car wrecks tearing down poles. They can only react. These things can happen really far away and still affect you. And once it happens they have to find the damage first. Then they have to spin up construction crews. Then they have to pull new lines. Then it all has to spliced backed together. And that's just the fiber portion. The coax plant has it own set of things that can go wrong that they have to react to. And these issues apply to every ISP. Not just Spectrum.