 Review by StreetSpirit 
UPDATED: 120 days ago
member for 7.2 years, 4126 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Roslyn,Nassau,NY
 $65 per month
 about 3 days
 "Connection is stable. Speeds are holding. Ultra tier introduced! When it works, its pretty cool!"
 "Ultra uses Boost's 609mhz downstream channel may cause congestion. YMMV, some nodes are fine, many more are CONGESTED. Boo!"
 "I think this is a fine ISP, one of the fastest if not the fastest in the country, but I experienced loads of problems...."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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* Note - This review is updated by top posting. Apologies but it's too late to reformat it.
July 24, 2009
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OOL Boost has been performing well in my case, which caused a re-assessment of my review. Brooklyn has been doing well, and more importantly, the medical office in Roslyn Heights has not experienced any problems for a while now, maybe upwards of 8 months.
I currently have OOL BOOST in three locations, Brooklyn 11224, Roslyn [Nassau County] 11576 and a BOOL [ Business OOL ] in a medical office in the Roslyn Heights 11577 next door to my home.
This review previously focused on the poorest performing line, the one in Brooklyn, however, I decided to take into account all three accounts and recent developments of the new ULTRA tier, which literally is the fastest residential cable service in the country!
I love the BOOST perks, and have had good courteous people help me in time of need. As things were not always so smooth, this review had years of history. It's no longer accurate, and I decided that after 8 years, to wipe the slate clean and begin fresh from 2009.
It's by no means a perfect service. There are many problem areas, and it seems the way Cablevision reacts is to send the customer with the problem a string of cheap contractors, who'll try this, and that, and the other thing, usually by changing a splitter or clipping/replacing the heads of coax cables, or swapping your modem for the umpteenth time. The problem is, the previous contractor did all of that!
It takes a lot of energy and persistence to even get them to admit there's a problem.... This of course drives customers nuts and causes churn to FIOS.
Cablevision has to really look at this policy of sending inept people who do not wish to spend more than a couple of minutes at your home. But real techs cost $, heh.
Yes, I had long standing downstream problems on one of my accounts, and yes, I am not always the happiest camper, however, taking into account the free wi-fi access which to this customer is very handy (say I'm visiting relatives in Bklyn. Three city blocks from their home is the Coney Island boardwalk, and a hotspot _right there_. - ie, pick a bench or lay down a towel, and start surfing!
I used this when we went to the NYC Aquarium a few weeks ago. While the kids were oogling the fishies, I was googling the species and giving them interesting little facts about them on my wife's iPhone!
Now that's progress! The pace at which technology is moving these days is incredible. For example, ePaper fooled both me and my wife! And no tree huggers need suffer - no trees are hurt in the manufacture of ePaper!. 
I've had admirable downstream speeds, and the cable connection itself is as steady as a rock in all three places. The office connection has not gone down in over a year; my modems have uptime in the months!
Summer is here, and my signal levels did not creep upwards. Speeds like I said have been up to par, and generally I've been happy with the way it functioned since February.
The news however is not about BOOST.
Optimum Online introduced a DOCSIS 3.0 tier, the first one in our case. I uploaded some screen captures from various posted speeds on the Ultra plan.
The tier is residential, costs $99 dollars, uses 3 channels bonded together [609mhz, 615mhz, 621mhz IIRC (surprisingly, it shares one of the 6mhz wide channels with BOOST, 609mhz.).
The ULTRA tier has not yet introduced upstream bonding due to lack of certified equipment, however, I'm sure now that Verizon is running it's 50/20 tier at 50/35, we shall see some upstream improvement with time as hardware becomes less expensive and more sophisticated.
The ULTRA tier costs $99 dollars per month, however, there's a controversial 300 dollar "activation fee" on top of the 40 install fee. This is obviously to prevent month to month dabblers from month to month customers who just want to experience those speeds for a few months.
The ultra screen captures are _reproduced courtesy if people in the Optimum Online Forum.
Regards
Jan 19 2009
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Packet loss rears it's ugly head. Not a single word from OOL or Cablevision, "All systems are GO!" on their never-changing network status screen, they have all our email, info, telephone numbers and can easily let us know at least when calling that a tech wouldn't help. Well here's the latest from the dysfunctional world of OOL where customers have to share tidbits of news with themselves just to figure out wtf is going on with their broken service:
»[OOL] Solution for slow OOL.
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1/5/2009
OOL and BOOST and not performed very well since November, but that could just be holiday traffic... Many question whether full price for BOOST is still a worthy deal.
»[OOL] Atrocious peak time speeds continue. Nothing fixed in bkly
»Terrible Speeds, Brooklyn NY
»[OOL] Really Poor speeds in 11235 & Information about Nuvision
»Bronx Boost issues
»[OOL] Atrocious Speeds in 08901
And there's many more.
I'm fed up enough to consider leaving for inexpensive DSL. Why should I continue to pay premium price for this crap? 4mbit downstream?! OOL lost their marbles. I will give them a month or two to get their act together...
If you;re in Brooklyn and are thinking of getting OOL, or especially upgrading to BOOST, consider waiting until Cablevision gets it's act together.
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BOOST DOWNSTREAM FIX STATUS: not yet repaired....  , not going to be repaired.
FIRST DATE OF PROBLEM AND REPORT TO ISP: 12/2007...
^
Too long of a story to bother with.... it's resolved as of now. ... Snipped
** NOTE - The below screen captures are only to demonstrate people's posted speeds on the ULTRA plan. I do no yet subscribe to Ultra. Three BOOST accounts is enough for now.
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Thanks for reading my half-coherent ranting,
Dave
Attachments:
Followup comments:  JTZ
join:2009-02-01
| Packet lost Hello, I actually registered just to do the line test and check out what's going on with the massive packet loss.
I see that it is not just me having the problem with OOL in Brooklyn.
I've called and called, they did nothing to "fix" or even locate the problem. The 2 "tech"s they send out, 1st one didn't know what a packet loss is. The 2nd swear that a line that is split outside of house makes no difference in signal strength since it is in the "cable box".
Anyone have any idea to what is actually the problem in the area? It could be my line, which I am going to have them test/replace coming Tuesday. But so far as I read on, it is happening to a lot of ppl in the area. | |
|
StreetSpirit
Premium
join:2002-08-13
Roslyn, NY
 ·Optimum Online
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| Re line test Yes. I've been seeing packet loss during select hours. Usually prime time, of course correlating with the usual prime time traffic-jam.
When you perform a line quality test here, expect 2-4% or higher from the West Coast test, it's always been that way (on several ISPs, it's not OOL). However the East Coast test is almost always 0% or 2% when there is no packet loss.
Is there a pattern to your packet loss as to time of day?
Are your speeds otherwise up to par?
Regards- | |
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