Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but you know how important it is to SEARCH, and I did.

I have started using Opendns (https://www.opendns.com/ instead of the Time Warner Cable dns and it seems to have improved my cable service significantly in the last three weeks. Specifically, it is not that infrequent in my area that the Internet goes down and yet I can play Internet chess, just not use my Internet browser! This seems to be because a DSN server has gone down, I guess.

There has been one major Internet crash in my area (Los Angeles northern area) in the last three weeks, but cable has always been kind of crappy here --this used to be Adelphia territory. So even with the one crash, I seem to have seen a real improvement.