Review by phantom6294 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 6.4 years, 1384 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Neptune,Monmouth,NJ
 $30 per month (12 month contract)
 about 18 days
 "Fast speeds..."
 "Can't beat the speed for the price..."
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Before I begin, two 'disclaimers'...
- The $29.95 is because I opted for the Triple Play (VoIP, Digital TV, and Internet)
- The 18 Days from order to sucess is because right as I moved into my apartment, I was traveling during the week, so I had to schedule a weekend appointment; this is not Cablevision's fault in any way
Initial setup had one hiccup; from what the technician said, the "provisioning servers are down..." What that meant was my cable modem (internet and VoIP) didn't go active immediately. The install occured around 4 - 5pm on a Saturday evening and I was online by late that evening. One advantage was that I got ALL, and I mean ALL the channels on digital until it correctly provisioned my box.
Internet (aka Optimum OnLine): OOL speeds are 10Mbps / 1Mbps and I normally test in the upper 8Mbps range with frequent tests into the 9Mbps range for download speeds and generaly test in the upper 800Kbps and frequent tests in the lower 900Kbps range for the upload speeds. The only "outages" I have had have been because OOL doesn't seem to like the Spanning Tree Protocol my Linksys WRT54GS router w/ Sveasoft Talisman v1.0.5 firmware runs when using WDS. If I understand the issue correctly, the router cannot pull (or in my case, renew) an IP when STP is active. All it takes is disabling STP, renew the IP, and then re-enable STP. A hassle, but worth it for the features of Sveasoft Talisman firmware. I do at times seem to have speed problems. Often, when testing using the 'official' BBR speed sites, it runs through the initial download tests very fast and every so often during one of the larger file downloads it just stalls (for a reason I have not found yet) for about 5 seconds then picks back up at full speed. This stall seems to be calculated into my speeds and the results in these cases are misleading. Lately, I have been using a speedtest site from SpeakEasy and see more consistent results. Since hooking up my router in June '05 I have had the same IP which is VERY nice even though "technically" it is a Dynamic IP allocation. I am currently monitoring my connection with BBR and have not seen an outage other than related to the STP issue. My only complaint about my service is that the ping times to the west coast (80 - 90ms range) are too high for my picky nature when playing Xbox Live games... but OOL can't control it too much, so I don't hold it against them.
VoIP (aka Optimum Voice): I travel a lot and have two cell phones... so I didn't really need/want OV but I figured internet and cable tv alone (without the triple play package) could well reach nearly $100 (each portion of the triple play is $29.95 * 3 - ~$90), so why not. So, I rarely use my OV but when I do I can tell no difference from the days of using 'normal' phone. The best thing about OV is that the phone jack resides on the supplied cable modem and thus OV doesn't go through my router and from my experience, gaming/downloads & voip are not affected by one another.
Update: In June '06, I moved from Lakewood to Neptune. Apparently, since I crossed a County line, Cablevision wanted to setup a whole new account. At first, I didn't like the idea, but apparently by doing so I got the Triple Play deal again... so whatever. I did have to switch phone numbers, but no biggie as everyone uses my cell anyway.
Cablevision insisted that a tech had to come INSIDE my apartment to set up the service. When I transferred my equipment EVERYTHING worked fine. However, because of the new account, they had to swap out both the Cable box and Cable Modem; whatever.
I did get three more months of bills for the OLD account; Cablevision kept telling me the appt to disconnect the service kept getting moved and to ignore the bills...... that was extremely annoying but eventually the bills stopped coming (and so far my credit rating is intact!)
Speeds were fine, but was still having the 'hiccup' in speed tests. The hiccup got worse when I upgraded to Boost (30Mbps). I eventually figured out the router, a WRT54GS v2, was the culprit as the v2 of the WRTs has some issues. Overclocking helped, but I eventually moved to a WRTSL54GS which has a much faster CPU and I am now testing at over 25Mbps Down (max test so far about 28Mbps) and over 4Mbps Up. Also, no more 'hiccups' using the BBR speed tests.
Also, I've since moved away from Sveasoft to dd-wrt. What was I ever thinking with Sveasoft?!?!
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Cablevision
