Review by nnaarrnn 
UPDATED: 288 days ago
member for 5.1 years, 1391 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Nitro,Kanawha,WV
 $59 per month
 about 120 days
 "Fastest connection available in the greater Charleston Area"
 "Suddenlink and their contractor company Baker aren't on the same page with anything"
 "Awesome after July 2008"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings below consensus)
|
Moving into a new house, changing from rock solid Verizon DSL (1.5/384) to Suddenlink (6Mbit/256kbit). I ordered service on Monday the 29th. Scheduled install date was Thursday Nov. 1. Install time was to be 1-5. Joking around at the office (tech company that deals with suddenlink all the time) I said they'll either be there at noon or midnight.
I get a call at 3pm from suddenlink telling me that the tech was being held up at his current install, and would be to my house in a little more than an hour. No big deal, we were at the house painting and laying wood floor, so we'll be there all evening.
I call 3 hours later at 6pm to find out what's going on, and he's still on the install before me, and they've sent 3 more techs to assist him. A supervisor calls dispatch, and they tell me that he'll be just a little while longer.
I call back at 7:30 to find out if he's still coming, or if I should reschedule. They give me a $20 credit and tell me they can reschedule if I want for first thing tomorrow morning. I told them that I would wait, but that it's new construction and there's no heat yet, and it's starting to get a lil chilly.
8:46pm-they call and say "our tech is ready for you if you still want him tonight" I tell them to send him on over.
Tech was from their contractors company-->Baker Installations. He was nice, complaining about the previous install taking forever, and asks me what all is entailed for my install. 9:15pm by now. I show him where the cable comes into the house, and tell him where the drops are in the house. He is very quick about putting the digital box in, and asks where i want the modem. I show him where the drop is, but tell him that my wife wants it on the other side of the room. I told him as long as everything works, if he'd leave some coax, I'd make the run myself.
We hook the modem up, and the signal is a little off, and the speed is way off (3.5Mbit/256kbit). He goes outside and changes the fittings in between the pole line and the house line, and then changes out the splitter in the basement, adding a 2-way splitter for the modem before the 3 way for the TVs. He asked me if I wanted him to move the one line, and I told him it was 10pm and if he'd leave some cable, he should go home. He left me about half a roll of RG-6 (400+feet)
Speeds are up to par (5.54Mbit/256kbit). I will add to this in a month or so.
UPDATE
Upgraded to their 12mbit/768kbit package in March. Still havnt seen 12mbit. Techs come out in groups, and still cant figure out why my speed varies between 1.2mbit and 11mbit. I'd be happy to have at least a constant 10. I may end up going back to DSL, even though its slower (3mbit where i'm at now), it's more consistant. If I do that, then I'm dumping video services in favor of Direct TV since they have wayy more HD than Suddenlink.
UPDATE 7/28/2008
Yeah, after the "upgrade at the head end" I can't complain. We're opening a branch office, and we're even going to use Suddenlink over a T-1. Since after the upgrade, we're all getting kick @$$ service. Speeds are 13-16mbit to the world and 17-19mbit to anything on suddenlink's network. The slowest I've seen it has been 11.5mbit and that was at 7:30 on a friday night during the kiddies myspacing time.
I torrented Fedora Core 9.0 the other day and it ran at a VERY IMPRESSIVE 1.2MByte/sec speed almost the entire download. Latency to our datacenter in charleston has greatly improved from 20+hops with 200ms+ latency to now 15 hops every time with an average of 50-60ms latency. They even gave me a credit that I couldnt have been happier with.
Battlefield 2 still lags out every 20 minutes or so, but I havn't really dug through the traffic shaping in my router to see if I slowed it down. The Vista Media Center PC in the living room keeps a consistant enough speed now to never need to buffer any of the online concerts/movies/shows we watch.
UPDATE 1-24-09
Been seeing crappy speeds since September. A few calls to the local office in October, I was finally told that they were "adding a card at the first of the year to help compensate being oversold" Here it is almost February and I'm sill less than 7mbit. Latency is horrid most of the time, causing problems with my Vonage phone service and I can't get above 6mbit on the download side. Every time I do a test with their test server »speedtest.wv.suddenlink.net I get less than 90% Quality of Service which is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE! I really wish they'd fix whatever they need to fix.
My parents in the next town over have their phone service and totally hate it because more than 50% of the incoming calls hear "All circuits are busy now....."
Come on Pete, let us know what's going on here, or at least be honest with us and tell us it's never getting any better.
Followup comments:  
namename
@suddenlink.net
| new modem might help Hello, Most techs don't know anything other than what their training books tell them, This being said if your speeds aren't up to par with your service plan, i suggest you replace the modem suddenlink offers (i assume an ambit modem) with a sb4200 or higher cable modem from Motorola. Before while cox was still in this area, we would regularly have various problems with the net, and the techs (over a year or so, once every 3-4 months) could never fix it. I got a sb4200 from a friend and the net started acting up, so before i called their techs to come out, i just called and had them register the sb4200's HFC mac address and plugged it in, Since then(3+ years ago), i've had no trouble with the net unless it was the ISP (cox or suddenlink). There is some problem with getting a "solid" 10mbit download, but using multi source downloading it will easily get that speed or abit higher. Single connection's for a download seem to be capped somewhat below the 10mbit, but not the total throughput.
In short, if you are still having trouble, get your own modem, the newest Motorola modems are around $60 at the local walmart here. this should atleast make the net stable and as fast as possible.
Next after you get the modem lookup your currect state's laws and the suddenlink TOS to see if its possible to use a custom firmware on the modem, if you can legally, you can tell the modem to use any "config" file that your ISP hosts, which may allow you to get the highest possible speeds.
Please note that replacing a modem firmware is somewhat technical but shouldnt be too hard, also there are even places (online) you can get these modems that already have a custom firmware on them, so all you have to do is call the isp tell them the hfc mac address of it, then plug it in and let it use the default config for about a week or so, which will let your modem save all the configs that your isp sends to people, after that you can start testing these configs on your own. | |
| jiveabillion3
join:2006-09-10
Huntington, WV
| Suddenlink 12Mbit I have the 12Mbit service from Suddenlink in Hurricane,WV and I think it's awesome. I regularly get about 1000-1200KBps which is VERY close to 1MBps and it makes me pretty happy. I haven't had any problems from them at all and I hope it stays that way. As long as speeds stay consistent and they don't decide to follow the new "Death to the Future of Internet" Bandwidth Usage Caps that the other big fish are trying out.
On that note, being a web developer and avid internet user, I really don't want to have to get back into the trend of making file sizes smaller even if it means less interesting features for websites just because people will end up not wanting to surf sites that eat up their allotted bandwidth limit. I can't tell you how much the idea angers me. It's almost as bad as how the gas prices make me feel. | |
|  | nnaarrnn
join:2004-09-30
Nitro, WV | Re: Suddenlink 12Mbit a coworker of mine lives in hurricane and regularly sees 14mbit. You guys are fed off the milton system, not the st. albans system. Totally different age/quality fiber on the poles. | |
| Pete Abel
Premium
join:2008-01-15
Saint Louis, MO | email or IM me with account info nnaarnn -- we just helped someone, I thought in your area, and he's seeing great results. remind me of your account info via IM or email (pete.abel@suddenlink) and I'll see what's going on. | |
| | | |
| Forums » comments on review of Suddenlink |
|
Suddenlink
(24)
(19)
(39)
·
·