I think this is common problem for new construction - I live in a new condo and had to talk Comcast into giving me service here, and even then they insisted on using another condo unit # because mine wasn't in their system yet... and then after my first statement I had to "change my address" to my actual address....

"At this point I'm ready to call Dish Network. DirectTV. Have my kids do finger-puppet shows for grandma. Anything."

Roof antenna?

I had the same trouble when I moved into a new subdivision. What you need to do is call up their regular customer service line and request a verification of serviceability. They'll send someone out of their construction department to mark off distances to the new location, and if they need to run new lines they can set that up. After that, they'll add you to the database and can setup services.

As far as the pricing thing, I've seen that too. They've got a bunch of 3rd party sales teams which have specials that the actual reps at TWC can't use. I'd go to Timewarnercable.com if you actually want to deal with the company, instead of some contractor.

Even worse, I've heard of this happening with 911 service. Some metro areas are (were?) just expanding so quickly in the construction boom that no databases could keep up with the new addresses.

I work for Qwest Communicaitons and this is a common problem with an easy solution. All you have to do is follow their procedure for addresses that have not been set up in the system. In almost all cases it is getting some information from the county office about the legal discription of the address (township section and range). And that is it. No pleading, no special trick, just get your address in their system and they will gladly take your money.

I had a similar problem with Earthlink. In this case, I was an existing customer and wanted to upgrade my service. I contacted them to find out how much extra the upgrade would cost per month. So, yes, I was offering to give them more money, if only they would tell me how much. "Sales" was unwilling to quote me a specific rate and kept directing me to "tech support", who had no idea what the rate would be.

I canceled my service (after suffering through their 15-minute customer retention script) and switched to AT&T, who had their rates clearly posted on their website.

I had a similar problem with my new house and Cox Cable. Houses one block each direction could be confirmed by the sales rep on the phone as having cable.. but she kept saying "I cannot guarantee that we can give you service because that address has never had service before." which I replied "probably because 6 months ago it was a dirt lot"..

After promising to send out a truck to check the address for servicability in 2 days and call me, I thought I would get a yes or a no and could proceed with things... 2 weeks later I have almost the exact same conversation with another rep including the promise to roll a truck to check it out and call me with a reply.. with the same result of no truck, no reply, no nothing.

I now have Dish Network and qwest DSL.. :) and am much happier for it.. ;)

Trying a different tact...

The phrase is, "Trying a different tack." You use the work tack in the sense of tacking one's sails on a sailboat. If you try a different tack, i.e.: tie your sails in a different way, then maybe you catch the wind and get your sailboat underway.

@ivanthemute: And how long does that take? If you're ready and willing to give them your money, you shouldn't have to jump through hoops and wait extra long. When you tell them that your house is brand new, they should KNOW to do a verification of serviceability. You shouldn't have to request anything, it is their job to provide you with service.

I thought "tact" was short for "tactic;" i.e. trying a different tactic.

Nowadays, to a company you don't exist if you are not in their database.

Sometimes it is a bless.

All you have to do is use YOUR address and say there's an apartment there and the main account is for the office, then when the guy comes out explain the situation and he'll probably just wire up your mom's house, or possibly run more wire in yours then just string a cable over to her house and take the equipment over there

Wow, I had this happen to me with that company too... only in my case, it wasn't new construction, the house was 90 years old, and my upstairs neighbors had cable service with them already! I went through six phone reps, all of whom would insist that I didn't know what my address was (I'd lived there a year before I decided to get cable put in so that was pretty unlikely) and that I *must* have moved in to replace the little old lady next door (who would have been very annoyed if I tried to take over her apartment). When I'd make plain to them that I knew darn well what my address is and that the house had been there a long time and please stop insulting me by telling me I don't know what I'm talking about, they'd just transfer me to someone else. When I finally got someone willing to work with me on the problem, she discovered the issue: their computer couldn't handle my address. She got a manager who promised to work on the problem and call me back in an hour. Two hours later I signed up for a different cable company. (Time Warner is the reason my town opted to allow cable competition.)

A broader question is how much discretion and information should the CSRs have? If the goal is to actually have the CSRs solve problems, it would seem that some actual training and at least limited authority to bind the company would be needed. A lot of these CSRs are simply reading from a script and if you go off script, they can't help you and oftentimes can't refer you to anyone who can. They don't understand the issue because they haven't been properly trained.

I will do do finger-puppet shows for grandma for much less that the price of anything you can get from Time Warner. I'll even throw in some tin cans and string to sweeten the deal.

@Don't take anything aaron8301 says seriously: It should be the reps job, when they don't see the address in the database, to verify that it is new construction, and handle it appropriately. Poor training or poor procedures by TW screwed this up. Whatever manager is responsible for that needs about 30 days in a jail cell to set him straight.

@Franknbeans: The problem appears to be that TW either has no procedure to handle this, or failed to train their reps to refer to such a procedure (handing it off to someone else if need be). They are not only hiring the bottom of the barrel for reps, but also for managers, too.

@JiminyChristmas: The phrase is "Trying a different tactic".

@Lucky225: Switch the house numbers if they are on the same street. Then when the guy shows up at the "wrong" house, tell him "This is not 225 ... this is 227 ... 225 is over there" (pointing to the other house).

@JiminyChristmas:
tact \ˈtakt\
2 : a keen sense of what to do or say in order to maintain good relations with others or avoid offense

A different tact kinda works for me, but I'm guessing @Skaperen: and @Don't take anything aaron8301 says seriously: are right in assuming that the point that the op was trying to get across was a new tactic.

Even worse is when you are in a home that was newly constructed and the cable/phone company think you are a commercial building on the other side of town. That happened to me when I moved into my home. Verizon had my phone number listed in the Yellow Pages for 2 years before I was able to figure out what business my number was listed under. When they were initiating service at my home, they kept sending the technicians to the address that they thought service was at until I was able to convince them that there actually was a house where I was living, and the house was not relocated from the other side of town with telephone lines still attached.

@Skaperen: No, JiminiyChristmas is right. "Tack" is the idiom.

I recently moved and tried signing up for Roadrunner through Time Warner's website... Two days later I receive an email from Time Warner claiming that they are unable to service my address at this time and outright cancel the order without any further information.

So I sign up for Earthlink, which is provided through Time Warner. I get tired of waiting for Time Warner to contact me to arrange installation after several days and attempt to contact them only they have no idea what to do with me. Forty five minutes later along with a conference call between Time Warner and Earthlink they manage to get me into the system and scheduled to have cable internet activated and at an earlier scheduled date than what Time Warner offered on their website in the first place. I was quoted a $24 activation fee over the phone because a tech would have to climb the pole and connect two ends of wire together. The tech arrives and their system has a $39.95 activation fee tagged onto it and now I have to wait to receive a bill to dispute the charge.

As for cancelling the old account... I made the mistake of moving to a different area before cancelling the account and returning the cable modem. I attempt to go into a local Time Warner office at the new address to return the cable modem and cancel service only I can't because I've moved far enough away that I'm in a different regional territory for Time Warner, and they have nothing to do with the Time Warner from the old address. So I call Time Warner back home, get stuck on hold for 15 minutes for an estimated two minutes wait time, and hopefully managed to actually cancel my account. Now I'm waiting for a revised bill and shipping information to be sent to me so that I can pay what I owe on the account and return the cable modem to them. It's been a week, still waiting.

Time Warner's making this so much harder than it needs to be.

@Aesteval: And I also want to say that almost all of the CSRs tried to be helpful and the service tech that installed the service was great, but Time Warner as an entity has some serious issues. Essentially the story universally went "we'd like to help you, but we can't."

Interesting. I was looking at a new subdivision this weekend, and TWC is refusing to provide service since AT&T beat them and got U-verse in first. So TWC did the math and determined they wouldn't reasonably get their investment back because of the competition, and won't run their service into the community now.

Good thing is that AT&T still has competition in the area so they won't be trying to raise prices on one subdivision like TWC used to do based on your zipcode....

@ShruggingGalt:

Don't cable companies HAVE to provide service in towns that grant them franchisees? I though that was the point of a franchise - the town only allows the one cable co, and they have to provide to all locations. U-Verse isn't cable.

Check with your town / city hall to find out what's happening with their local franchise.

I am so happy to get so many English and Spelling lessons on Consumerist. If only my college professors had given me this much help before I had to write a paper, they would not have had to use so many red ink pens while marking one of my papers. Keep up the [grate/great] work guys.

Or something that happened to me. Had phone service, didn't have phone service, had phone service and repeat.

AT&T had entered incorrect data in to their computer. They would turn my service on but at the same time disconnect the service of someone that lived right next to us. They couldn't get it through their thick skulls that they were two different, unrelated addresses.

@Don't take anything aaron8301 says seriously:

This should probably be done about as soon as you get your address # while the house is being built. That way, by the time the house is move-in ready, your utilities will be there waiting for you.

You get your electricity installed (at least temporarily) within weeks of breaking ground on the empty lot. Why not make sure everything else is there, too?

You should've just said to heck with it and move on to other services. Our cable company offers a phone/internet/tv package for about $110 per month.

DirecTV or Dish would give you a great deal and grandma wouldn't know the difference. $50 per month.

Basic local phone service: $30 per month. (And safer if you lose electricity since it's not tied to the cable modem.)

DSL Light from local ISP: $20. Does grandma really need 10mbs internet?

Total: $100, although your costs may vary but I'll bet not by much.

@Skaperen: Really? A jail cell? I hate inefficient and incompetent corporate policy and procedure as much as the next guy, but methinks jail time is a mite over the top...

Yeah, new construction.

My ex-wife and I once rented a house that had recently been moved/relocated to a street to replace two or three trailer lots. The husband/wife landlords had bought the house from the guy who moved/renovated it and they were pretty good folks overall. Essentially it was new construction so I got to do stuff like revise the phone system wires under the house, trouble shoot water leaks, some minor $5 to $20 stuff which the landlord paid for by taking it off our rent.

While the home interior had been wired for cable when renovated, the cable terminated outside the foundation. The cable company wanted $125-$175 to hook the cable to the street. The landlords didn't want to pay that much so we went with rabbit ears and let the next schmoe bite that bullet.

(The next schmoe couple did bite the bullet and got cable installed but within 9 months did about $5k in damage to the home during several domestic fights. The landlords ended up calling us to get an affidavit about the home's good condition when we moved out. But, hey, the landlords got the cable run to the house for free.)

@econobiker: I should have mentioned that the rent was only $525 monthly (a rural area outside of Chattanooga, TN) so $125 to $175 for the cable run was a big chunk of change relatively...

@HogwartsAlum: Yup. It's from sailing--it means, roughly, changing your direction to get a more advantageous angle to the wind. Though I see it more usually as "taking a different tack."

@Aesteval: I had one of my favorite surreal conversations ever with Time Warner when I moved away from them years ago and handed over my cable box. They needed for some reason to note how it had been hooked up, and I explained that I had two VCRs hooked up to my TV (I did a lot of dubbing, one was multi-region, etc.). Not only could she not grasp this, she was determined that I was a poor deluded thing who had no idea what I owned, and she kept trying to walk me through the setup in a way that led to a second TV. I just kept patiently repeating "I have one TV and two VCRs" to the point where that phrase is now burned in my head as a peculiar mantra.

@Don't take anything aaron8301 says seriously: For me it took two days after I requested it. Service was up and installed three days after that. The dude who came out and did the verification told me they input the addresses in bulk once every thirty days, when the post office sends them the updated list of locations within a zip code, so it *should* be done automatically during the build process, but you know how *should* works...

@wrjohnston19283: It's entirely possible that the "new subdivision" is in an unincorporated place and therefore has no local franchise, or is in Texas where they've managed to create a "state franchise" that providers are allowed to use in lieu of a local franchise if none already exists (and they can use it as leverage when it's time to renew local franchises.) The state franchise doesn't require them to serve all areas.

@laffmakr: Don't put too much faith into the duration of battery backup on telephone COs in newer areas. They don't build them like they used to. I think they used to build for something like 48 hours of off-grid battery operation, and have cut it to a few hours for new COs. (This is all hearsay, but from friends in "the business.")

Time Warner really doesn't seem to want business, do they? We have phone service through them and I think two months straight is the maximum we've gone without disruptions to service or just plain no service at all, all the fault of TW. They're extremely reluctant to properly install or repair anything, and as they don't seem to care about retaining us as customers we've decided we'll be happy to choose one of their competitors.

It's not just new construction, it's the quality of their databases in general.

Apparently it's been a long time since anyone had AT&T phone service at my address. I bought the house 2.5 years ago, and when I took possession there was a voice/data cablemodem sitting on the floor by the cable jack. I buy data service from the cable company, but get my voip from another provider so I didn't need AT&T at that time.

When they started offering uverse in my neighborhood, I looked into it to see if I could save any money or get more for the same money. Well, I tried to look into it, anyway. They swear up and down that they can't provide uverse to my address, even though they can provide it to every adjacent house in any direction, including the other 3 houses served from the same utility pole.

Ah, well... my cablemodem has proven highly reliable and performance is always at or very near the 10x1 nominal speeds, so AT&T can suck it.

I've worked for a few similar companies, and the problem is the several less trained and focused Outsource support departments and third party sales companies.

Usually if the address isn't in the system the third parties can't set up the order, and if you call and get outsource they may be able to add the new address, but most likely won't care to try to find out how.

Of course if everyone was employees of the company making living wages then you wouldn't have those great discounts.

@JiminyChristmas: Gist, the central idea or the essence. You know what he meant.

I think it's rude and dismissive to let the importance of what someone is saying get buried under a misused idiom, folks.

Besides, if you understood it well enough to tell everyone what was wrong with it, chances are good that you didn't need to bother correcting him after all. ;)

@GearheadGeek: "Only in America can you name yourself something that suggests it's all-encompassing and then not actually offer service to that degree. :P

@ivanthemute: Try living in the same house for 15 years and then having a zipcode change for your half of town. *headsmack* 5+ years later, and I still run into the occasional website that won't accept my zipcode. It's especially fun when they want to use the zipcode as a credit card verification. Like no...really...you need to take this zipcode...

Happens pretty infrequently now, but I used to have huge issues with PayPal. Ugh.

TWC did the same to us for our newly built house. The CSR even looked the address up on google maps and told us it was an empty lot! It took several weeks to work the situation out.

Couple things I'm gonna say here.

Forget ordering online, talk to the (usually) nice competent person on the phone. You enter an order online, it gets sent to some outgoing sales department and the rest of the call center doesn't know it exists.
We may or may not be able to match any offers as not all offers are made available to all departments, but also wouldn't be in a hurry to get off the phone as not reliant upon commission.

New construction or a home that has not been serviced previously is in my experience always an issue. Phone rep enters survey request, tech sent out to verify address and what will need to be run to establish service, forwarded on to be approved or disapproved, wait, forwarded to construction if approved, wait, wait, call back because you haven't heard anything, re-forward to construction, wait, wait, construction eventually completed, address entered into system so actual installation order can be placed.

On a somewhat related note, phone means correct address is doubly important due to 911, meaning more work on TWC's end most of which the customer never sees.

I'm not in the NY area, but I do work for TWC.

Here is the short of what needs to be done. Call billing and ask for an availability request. Once thats done, put in your order.

Now the long part of it.

Customer goes online to a 3rd party website to set up service. We call these retail sites because they are run by a another company that sells our service. The deals that you see on there are in most cases exclusive to that website. Its similar to going to Walmart to buy a cell phone. They have different prices and promotions that are available to them. The cell phone company may have a promo where you get 20 percent off, but walmart will have a promo where you get 30 percent off. The local cellphone office won't honor those prices because its a different store. Similar issue here. If you want those special prices you have to go through the 3rd party site. Now, I will say this, in my time here, I've seen retail prices that are horrible. My favorite was making the customer buy a 50 dollar modem so they can get 6 months of road runner at 29.99. If you simply go through your local office, you'll get the same price without having to buy the modem.

So, Retail tries to set her up with service, but the address doesn't exist for them to use. And since they're a 3rd party, they don't have the option to put in request to add new addresses. Why? Not sure really. I can only speculate that its for security purposes. Only give them access to selling, but not much more than that. And it makes sense I suppose. AT&T isn't going to give Walmart access to its customer service base because people can fiddle with it.

So now, what needs to be done? First, the OP needs to contact CUSTOMER SERVICE/BILLING directly and have whats called an "Availability Request" or Service Request in. Again, CUSTOMER SERVICE/BILLING should be able to do this for you. Essentially, all this entails is a tech goes out and confirms that there is a residential and that they can recieve service with the existing equipment/lines available. Once confirmed, a direct sales rep with TWC (not a 3rd party), will contact you set up service. Speak with them first and see what they have to offer. If their deal isn't comparable (check price, length of promotion, install fees, etc.) and make sure that you're getting the deal you need.

I stress length of promotion for one specific reason. Last year, a lot of customer were signed up at Best Buy for digital cable for just 39.99. But the length of the contract was only 3 months. While that was happening, we were offering a promo for 12 months at 49.99. If I remember, retail rate was around 60 to 70 a month. While not the most significant in savings, you're still looking at 120 savings versus 60 in savings. Doing the math will help you in the long run.

@cjh9322: So the helpful CSR thinks that Google Maps' satellite view is a live feed? "Oh, if the picture is an empty lot, your house couldn't possibly be there. I'd see it." Next time, tell them you had a camouflage roof put in so people couldn't spy on your via Google Maps and Google Earth.