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Review by stevenwalter See Profile

  • Location: Tyler, Smith, TX, USA
  • Cost: $225 per month
  • Install: about 3 days
107 meg internet speed is very fast, most of the time.
It used to be fast all the time. caps are absolutely ridiculous. HD video quality is garbage.
I like the internet for the most part, but the DTV is gone the minute the superbowl is over.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
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I'll say it right off the bat, I am a Suddenlink customer because there are no other realistic options for decent internet speeds. This is just the reality of things. Cable is an internet monopoly in a lot of places. They all like to act like they're just that much better than everyone else at being innovative, like we're all just supposed to ignore the fact that they got lucky that an infrastructure that has existed for decades just happened to be the best way to carry internet. But I digress.

I have their DTV service, but with 4k TV's on the way, I find it pretty pathetic that they're still delivering 720p video that hasn't improved in quality for the entire time that they've offered it. The DVR is old and laggy, and you can hear the harddrive spinning constantly, even when nothing's being recorded. The only reason at all that I even have it, is because they offer NFL Redzone, but im sending it back when football season is over, and next year i'll probably just go with DirecTV.

I didn't have any real problems with customer service, though I've mostly used their online chat, and I imagine that those CSR's have more experience than those who answer calls.

I've had the 107 meg connection for about 3 years now, and for the first 2 years or so, I could reliably get the rated speed, but now it rarely happens, and the modem and modem signals are all fine. I was very pleased with it until they tried to implement bandwidth caps. They tried to give my 120 dollar a month, 107 meg internet connection, a 350 gig cap. To put into perspective just how absolutely ridiculous that is; if I wanted to fully utilize my connection, I could have hit the monthly cap in 7 hours. That's right, 7 hours a month of full utilization is what these greedy hacks tried to limit me to. That's 15 minutes a day of full speed utilization. 15 minutes!

I talked to multiple people about how ridiculous it was. Do you want to know the only excuse they could even come up with for why I should be ok with it? They say that only 1% of their customers go over the cap, so it should be plenty! So my question is: WHY DO THEY NEED A CAP THEN? Honestly though, practically everyone I've talked with there agrees how absolutely beyond ridiculous of a bandwidth cap it is for a 107 meg service. Even their own employee's can't stomach covering for them on this one, and covering for Suddenlink is half of what a CSR does for a living. Anyone who gets this service obviously has multiple heavy users in their house. I mean you'd think they'd give some sort of break to people who were willing to shell out the money for the best service they offered. One recommendation I got from a CSR was to drop the 107 meg connection, and buy 2 20 meg connections, for the same price. How ridiculous is that?

Apparently Suddenlink think's that it can just take a service like the internet, which has been rated by transfer speeds for as long as it has existed, and change the definition of what you're even paying for. Suddenly, after 2 decades, internet traffic is just like a water utility! Such innovation! Though coincidentally, they sure aren't going to start offering everyone the same connection speed at a low base rate, and charge a low rate based purely on bandwidth used, are they? Of course not!

Perhaps I can save money on my water bill by having the city downgrade the size of the water pipe that comes to my house to something smaller, . I also wonder; does Suddenlink have a bandwidth well somewhere where it keeps all of it's bandwidth? . I mean the water system has an infrastructure that needs upkeep and upgrading too, on top of collecting the water, right? And if Internet is like water, then they obviously must spend a bunch of money collecting bandwidth to provide to it's customers. I mean surely Suddenlink wouldn't push a disingenuous false equivalency, just to squeeze more money out of people without having to lift a single finger to improve their service, would they?

Luckily, at least for the time being, the cap is disabled. Why? Because after months of artificially inflating customer bandwidth usage, and denying it, they got caught red-handed when power went out in one area for almost a week, and meter's in this area still recorded gigabytes worth of bandwidth usage.

They also were called out for the meter page claiming to be, at most, 2 hours behind, when it was, in fact, 2-3 days behind. This caused some users (myself included) to think we were under the cap for the month, only to get the splash screen saying we went over, 3 days after the cap reset! I'm sure it will be back soon enough though. I mean how else are they going to compete with Netflix? What are they going to do, improve their TV service? LOL! Oh, and let's not forget that their own streaming service doesn't count against the bandwidth cap!

Well, that's enough ranting I think. You all get the picture, and what's worse, here I am admitting to still being a customer. Yep. Speaks to the situation doesn't it?

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