Jeff Simmermon, the Digital Communications Director for Time Warner Cable, has responded to the charges that TWC is responsible for the lags and disconnections plaguing East Coast World of Warcraft players. He took a look at the traceroutes posted on Blizzard’s user forums and sent the response.

I’m the director of digital communications at Time Warner Cable, and I’d like to bring some clarity to this discussion. We’re happy to to take our lumps when we’ve earned them, but it doesn’t seem to be the case in this instance.

Take a look at some of the traceroutes posted to the thread in question … starting here, at comment #446: http://tinyurl.com/5gqe27

If you follow the commenter’s posted trace results, you’ll notice that it’s only on TWC’s Roadrunner (rr) network for the first 6 hops — with maximum response times of 10 ms. The response time jumps drastically at hop # 11 — when the trace is no longer on the Roadrunner network.

Scroll down further on the same page to comment #456, and you’ll see something similar — a giant leap in lag times. However, this trace never touches our network. It starts at Verizon, goes to Alter.net at hop #5, and then jumps to ATT.net’s network at hop #8. Hop #9 shows a response time of 114 ms — quite a jump from the 49ms at hop #8.

On the first page of the thread, you’ll see something similar: http://tinyurl.com/3hfs9k

At comment #10, the lag time leaps from 18ms on our network at hop #6 to 150ms at hop #7 — on Level3, an Internet backbone.

At comment #18 (same page), the trace again never touches our network. The lag jumps from 15 ms at hop #3 to 261 ms at hop #4, while on the Verizon network. The hops vacillate between high and low response times throughout the trace.

Blizzard’s comment at the top of the thread that “Unfortunately this means that the only commonality between all the players experiencing these disconnects and extreme latency is Time Warner/Road Runner” is a pretty interesting choice of words, in light of the fact that several of the troublesome traceroutes posted in the forum itself never touch our network.

Jeff Simmermon
Director, Digital Communications
Time Warner Cable

So, is Blizzard just trying to pass the buck to the best available scapegoat? If both companies aren’t responsible for the lags and disconnects, whos is? Does anyone know how this crazy Internet works?

(Photo: ashley_dryden)

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