Review by WaitinginNH 
UPDATED: 1.9 years ago
member for 3.2 years, 68 visits, last login: 7 days ago
 Westbury,Nassau,NY
 Contract price not specified.
 "Few outages, good availability"
 "Speeds can crawl, web pages hang, often have to reboot modem"
 "Still your best best if there's no Fios, but Fios is superior if avail"
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When I first got started with Optimum Online here in Westbury,NY about 2 1/2 years ago I was extremely pleased. I had good speeds (5-8mbps down, 1-2mpbs up) and no real issues or problems. Installation went extremely well and was done within an hour or so (cable line was already attached to the house, so they only had to wire in new cable into the room).
My modem is the SBV5120, which I got when I signed up for the triple play (voice, internet, TV) from Cablevision.
In the past year though problems started occuring. My speeds weren't as good, I suspect this may have to do with Cablevision creating a new tier of service called "Boost", which I do not have.
These days I am lucky to get 3mbps down and 1mbps up. The most annoying problem though has to do with web pages refusing to load, it happens even though I clean my cashe. When this happens I have to unplug and reboot the modem, and then pages load fine. Also emails sent to my account often wind up "lost", meaning I never get them. Email server performance is dismal, very, very slow, about the same speed as dial up!
This and various other problems with the TV (pixelation,etc) have made me positive about switching to Fios when it arrives in my neighborhood. Cablevision likes to say in their ads the Optimum network is completely fiber-optic, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Only the trunk lines to the towns are fiber-optic, the rest is coax, the same technology that Cable TV has always been using. In my case, the nearest fiber is 3/4 of a mile away. I guess because all the homes on the coax line, the line gets overloaded and results in the problems. Cablevision says there isnt much that can be done, they dont want to expand the fiber closer to my neighborhood.
But I am "stuck" with it, until Verizon Fios (eventually) gets to my town. Meanwhile I have to deal with having to reboot my modem every other night just to get a web page to load. And uploading is very difficult, Optimum Online is almost useless for trying to upload full resolution photos for online printing services.
The packet loss results in alot of upload errors.
It takes 1 minute to upload a 1mb photo, from my experience.
So, in closing, OOL is still better than DSL (which is even slower over copper), but is quite inferior to Fios, which a friend of mine has in Jericho for 2 years now, only a few miles away.
If Cablevision expanded their fiber capacity they could better compete with better service, but relying on so much coax will be the downside of their services.
No wonder Cablevision is fighting to hold so many people hostage by influencing town cable commisions to stall Fios deployment.
I know I'm sick of being a hostage, if this is a free market why is Cablevision my only option?
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