 Review by StreetSpirit 
UPDATED: 201 days ago
member for 6.2 years, 3727 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Brooklyn,Kings,NY
 $61 per month (12 month contract)
 about 3 days
 "Speeds up until Dec 2007 were outstanding (32mbit/4.5mbit on a good day)."
 "Unfixable speed problems (if you're lucky like me); shoddy contractor installs; BOOST thruput problems."
 "Sweet when it works, very frustrating when there are problems (if you're lucky like me). Expensive but generally worth it."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings below consensus)
|
* Note - This review is updated by top posting. Apologies but it's too late to reformat it.
BOOST DOWNSTREAM FIX STATUS: not yet repaired....  , not going to be repaired.
FIRST DATE OF PROBLEM AND REPORT TO ISP: 12/2007. Read below.
5/03/2008
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I received the following from Cablevision. My speeds will NOT be fixed. I will receive $30 dollars in credit, and was stepped down to the normal tier (not that I asked, but whatever..)
I've had it, I tried getting it fixed for 6 months, and it seems that Cablevision is UNABLE to fix it.
Note from OOL:
"Since your speed issue is still pending, we have removed the Boost from your account. We have backbilled you/credited you back until December 2007 (you were billed 14.95 for December but then had the 9.95 rate thereafter). A credit of $30.03 was applied to your account today along with partial month prorates totaling $21.87. What this all means is that you were not billed for Boost at all since December 2007. Your current account balance is a credit balance of .
As far as any speed issues that are still pending, you would need to work directly with AOM John Doe at 718-xxx-xxxx or OSP John Q. Public at 718-xxx-xxxx. They would be the best people to deal with as there isn't anything further we can do from DSL Reports. Please give them a call at your earliest convenience.
Thanks so very much and have a great day,"
5/02/2008
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About a month ago, Cablevision has called in the Big Boys. I had the local plant supervisor, two Boost business techs and a rep from RFDN (backbone) testing here about a month back for almost an entire day. They used their own laptop and modem, and even ran a fresh drop all the way down 15 flights of stairs to the media converter on the street to see if it's an inside-building wiring problem.
All tests showed exactly the same results. That was the last I heard from anyone at Cablevision.
No fix yet................................... Sigh
3/27/2008
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As there is not much news, I took the extraordinary step of contacting Mr. Wilt Hildenbrand, an AWESOME gentleman who helped me untangle a billing problem which occured to my elderly grandparents, facing disconnection of their cable if they didn't pay for an SA-1850 STB which was removed by a technician! Three months of calls and letters back and forth between Cablevision and myself were UNTANGLED IN 10 MINUTES by Wilt's team! I can only sing praises to the man as he's helped more people than I can count.
Mr. H is the Senior Adviser for Engineering and Technology at Cablevision: »www.cablevision.com/about/leader···rand.jsp
I received an immediate acknowledgment, which was something I didn't expect, meaning, didn't wish to disturb and was perfectly OK with waiting for work hours.
This gentleman is AWESOME, he helped us once before and we're hoping he can pull another trick out of his hat. If not, it's ok. I'll continue to work the problem through support but I have a LOT of faith in Wilt.
I forwarded the support thread from the private forum and a succinct description of the events.
Now off to paradise!  I'm leaving for San Juan for a few days tomorrow at 12 noon! Yay!
I raised the ratings a bit as the Motorola SBV5121XM fixed a lot of my OV issues, some of which were serious. It also completely eliminated any echo and feedback which was one annoying aspect of OV when being used with a digital cordless phone. Perhaps the Motorola uses higher quality components or is simply better designed. Maybe it's the TI chipset but I hear a large audible difference.
3/14/2008
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I was called by Brian of OOL Boost corporate support to follow up on the bad speeds. The gentleman was astute, noted that the downstream speed (with no other transfers and router disconnected) was sub-par, promised to stay on top of it which is comforting, but offers no real, immediate solution...
And I also received my bill today, where I'm paying an extra $10 for Boost. I intend to immediately contact Cablevision after the weekend and obtain credit. There's more than enough documentation that I'm not seeing Boost speeds. Paying extra makes no sense.
3/8/2008
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OOLTECH MM replied that they will seek a possible back end fix as everything we tried failed to raise the speeds. Stay tuned.
3/7/2008
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Today, I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. St. Jean, Tech #141. I found him to be miles above most other technicians who did work at my premises. He came bearing a Motorola SBV5121. An immediate plus in my book!
Mr. St. Jean immediately noticed the beehive of cable wires in our living room and immediately set about correcting the problem by running a fresh span to the room where OOL/OV is used.
After fixing up the wiring, he replaced the two splitters we had with one three way splitter. Following, he provisioned the SBV5121 for Boost and OV service.
I am extremely satisfied with today's visit, however, the speed issue does not seem to be resolved. Sigh.. I thought today would be the day.
3/2/2008
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Speeds reached an all time low for me. I find it hard to break 10mbps on a speed test. Only a few months ago, the same service was providing in excess of 34mbps. This is an unfortunate situation, as I'm sure if I decided to pay 1/3rd of my BOOST bill, I wouldn't have Innernet for very long...
OOLTECHs have scheduled a day this coming week when I'll be home to test with them... I'm not looking forward to the prospect of repeating all my tests but these G-d awful speeds are depressing!!!
Last night, I connected my modem directly to the incoming apartment tap. I then connected it directly to a machine which I am setting up that had a basic install of Ubuntu on it. After tweaking the RWIN, I again ran into a ~8-9mbps brick wall when downloading, although I did get the promised 4.5mb uploading.
In the real world, the lower my "throughput" is, the lower my speeds are, and fall far short of what I have become accustomed to with BOOST.
It's a sad situation. I WANT MY BOOST SPEEDS BACK ALREADY!! Four months is enough!
2/23/2008
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BOOST continues to perform in a subpar fashion. My speed test at the official Optimum Online speed test was 10mbit down / 4.5mbit up, 1/3rd of the bandwidth sold to me - "Up to 30mbit" .
It's slowing down again as it was around 17-18mbit for the last few weeks. This is absolutely pathetic and should be immediately addressed by Cablevision. I am NOT the only one with these problems, half the forum is complaining of serious slow downs.
Here's a download from an official OOL ftp which is within OOL's network and clearly shows the lackluster performance:
--09:25:08-- »ftp://ftp1.optonline.net/test64
=> `test64.1'
Resolving ftp1.optonline.net... 167.206.5.41
Connecting to ftp1.optonline.net|167.206.5.41|:21... connected.
Logging in as anonymous ... Logged in!
==> SYST ... done. ==> PWD ... done.
==> TYPE I ... done. ==> CWD not needed.
==> PASV ... done. ==> RETR test64 ... done.
Length: 67,108,864 (64M) (unauthoritative)
100%[================================================================================== ======>] 67,108,864 1.20M/s ETA 00:00
09:26:03 (1.16 MB/s) - `test64.1' saved [67108864]
30mbit my arse.
2/15/2008
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Today all three services went out at my co-op which my mother currently occupies. Am I lucky or what?
Mom lives in 11224. At around 8am her TV, phone and modem went out. The outage lasted about 12 hours and was acknowledged by a recording at Cablevision regarding this outage.
Her boxes came back up at around 5pm. Her phone just went back up (and by extension modem).
2/14/2008
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OV Again!!! Damnit, what is going on with them?
Came home to hear complaints from my sister who I convinced to save a few pennies and try OV last November. The difference in her bill was about $30 dollars a month. Her service has been adequate, but not exemplary. Recently their phone calls started to get routed directly to voice mail. They've been on the phone with techs and all, but at this moment, my sis should not be putting up with phone issues. Her hubby's mom in the hospital, intubated, and calls being very important, she missed a whole bunch of calls which never rang and went directly to voice mail from doctors seeking consent for a procedure.
I on the other hand have not had serious problems with OV, until the shoddy install at one of my properties. Guess YMMV, and won't be suggesting any services to family One lives and learns. It just seems to me like CV has bitten off a bit more than they can chew and the cracks in the walls of their network are showing...
Strange how a few months of BAD service can wipe away a year of memories of GOOD service. I honestly hope that CVC begins to address some of these issues; mainly increased unreliability with OV , decreasing prime time speeds, and decreased BOOST speeds across the board.
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2/11/08 - The jacks wired by the OV installer, and again rewired by the person fixing the first installer's mistakes once again went dead. I'm using a simple long patch cable directly from the modem. Once again, shoddy install practices which already cost me two full days are rearing their ugly head. And once again Cablevision will be tasked with paying to FIX for the THIRD TIME what should've originally been a simple 5 minute job.
Due to this, and due to the $20 I spent on tips for these goons + a large investment of personal time, I have reduced their technical support to 1. I'd give 0 if I could.
BOOST is averaging 12-17MB/s during non-prime time, and 4-8MB/s during prime time. Hardly 30 megabits by anyone's standards.
2/5/2002 I found out through the forum that the sales person lied to me and that not only could I have performed an OV self-install, I also could\ve saved a work day waiting for the contractor, and a $14.95 installation charge. And possibly averted all the RJ11 wiring related problems (read above.) Hence I've now lowered the Pre-Sales information to 3 and Install Co-Ordination to 2.
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2/2/2008 no such luck, I was once again back to the 17mbit ceiling - »Re: [OOL] Slow Downstream tonight
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2/1/2008 - For the first time in a good three months, I saw speeds in excess of 3.0MB/s : »Re: [OOL] Slow Downstream tonight
I thought maybe , could it be, finally, they fixed my service?
TO MAKE IT CLEAR ONCE AND FOR ALL: I never test speeds or attempt to gauge speeds while uploading. Whatever my personal internet usage habits may be, whenever I write about a slow down, or post a speed test, you can be ASSURED that I have done everything possible, including resetting my modem, router and even rebooting my PC to make sure there's nothing on my side that could possibly affect the test.
Please peruse the following thread which documents the slowdown problems being experienced by users: »[OOL] Slow Downstream tonight
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1/25/2008: OV Installation Day 2 - Fixing after contractors: Had two appointments today to fix all the problems caused by yesterday "Darwin winning contractor".
Winston, a supervisor, and Nigel, took one look at the way yesterday's technician installed OV, and the way the modem was resetting, and said this is not how we work, and this is not how we do installs! Cablevision would save a LOT of money if the techs OOL/OV uses did THEIR JOB PROPERLY and didn't require a 3 man team to fix their work from the day before.
Also the jacks were wired in such a half arsed way, I wasn't getting any ringing.
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1/24/2008: Technical ineptitude continues unabated from the wonderful "contractors" who install your service, and leave you for days without internet or dial tone or a cable box, promise to return and never show up, and totally fuck up the simplest of installs. AMAZING. I'm totally amazed at the amount of ineptitude I've seen today...
1/24/2008
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I decided to order an Optimum Voice line at one of my locations to save a few dollars over the Verizon POTS we had at the time. Little did I know that this decision set off weeks of trouble and agrivation. If I had known this, I probably would've ate the $20 a month difference in bills.
I was told that I could not perform a self install even though I had an SBV5120 VOIP-CAPABLE modem, and that I'd need to stay home and pay a $14.95 installation charge. They wanted $40 dollars to port a number which I've always considered exorbitant so no number was being ported.
I was given a 10-8 appointment. The guy was showed up was obviously a contractor, without tools, a drill, cabling, or just about anything one would need to perform the install!.
Further, he failed to bring me the replacement HD box I asked for, due to CV only allowing them a single HD box per day and he had already installed it. His supervisor literally yelled at him that "but it is right on the order" with him arguing that it wasnt on his copy.
He then proceeded to try and provision OV service on my Motorola SBV5120. The location did not have any OV. When he could not provision the service, he went downstairs and brought me one of those ancient DPX2203s that was quite obviously heavily used, in a plastic baggie. I obviously loudly protested, as my SBV5120 came new, and I had no desire to change from a modem I knew could keep a good lock to one I didn't, especially with OV. But for the sake of proceeding with the install, I said fine...
Little did I know..
He was unable to get the OV service going, or even the internet. Why? Because after he called provisioning, they told him they were having an outage and he had to wait for two hours. He promised to return as I was being left with a busted cable box, no internet, and no dial tone!
That was the last I ever heard from this guy again.
Over the course of about 5 hours on the phone, I succeeded in provisioning the modem, returning my BOOST settings on it, and getting the Optimum Voice line activated. Then, began a serious problem. The modem was FUBAR in two major ways:
a) It could not maintain lock, and would flap for a half an hour, get lock for a few minutes, then repeat the process. Obviously this killed any calls in progress and made things rather unusable.
b) The modem had a problem with generating a proper RING on it's RJ11 port. Meaning, it's ringer equivalency was extremely low, not providing enough current to make an old style phone or a multi-handset phone ring (as confirmed by a multimeter and an oscillascope). The result was that the phones would see 1 ring, and then not recognize the rest, hence, incoming phone calls only generated a single ring. I have some experience in sorting out REN issues, so it was obvious what was going on.
REAL CV TECHS RULE. Contractors cost CVC a pretty penny. This one botched install took several people to sort out for hours on site, and COUNTLESS calls to support. It could've also easily driven me to cancel all my services as things were going nowhere fast.
At this point I am VERY disappointed to what happened to their BOOST service. They basically oversold the hell out of it. People are seeing better speeds WITHOUT Boost than WITH! One other issue is the increased frequency of modem resets, which of course take out one's OV/VOIP call(s).
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12/14/2007:
From about the 14th, my Business Class, Static-IP BOOST service began sucking wind on downloads. I am in the middle of working this problem with support, and am awaiting a technician tomorrow, however, with all my signals in spec, and latency absolutely normal, I'm at a loss to figure out. The business rep in Tier-2, Tyrone, could not either. Perhaps my modem is on it's last legs. We shall see tomorrow.
(The below speeds are no longer representative, nor are the pings. Boost downstream speeds have taken a nose dive since the lower portions were written.)
Right now, there are obvious trouble spots where people are complaining of mild-to extreme slowdowns. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend OOL right now.
===============================================================
March 15, 2007 through November 2007:
I continue to be very happy with Boost which calls for an adjustment of my ratings. Boost, as far as I'm concerned is one of the best things to happen to the OOL service in ages.
Excellent job, OOL. Keep this service free of capping, and I wll be glad to stay with OOL for my internet, voip and tv needs.
--
October 16th, 2006.
I am quite impressed with the steps Cablevision has taken to improve their BOOST offering, and this this review must be updated.
BOOST has gone up to 30mbit/5mbit, and yes we actually get 4.2-4.4mbit upstream without difficulty. OOL approached the 'raise in speed' in increments, and cranked it up. Seemingly there is plenty of headroom, as my downstream speed of 30mbits is unaffected.
The port 80 cap, that silly 128kilobit "webserver" seems to be gone as well. It is a grand, long hoped for thing that OOL take some steps to a) improve their products by getting rid of some of the more draconian restrictions.
OOL remains quite reliable, slightly higher than my ADSL line which does occasionally go down for a few hrs. As a matter of fact I can't really remember when it has gone out.
Capping seems to be more or less relaxed on Boost. GOOD GOING OOL, now please make the "uncapping" less of a painful and insane process in case one does get capped. There's no good reason a person must make a call, wait for a callback, so forth in today's word of on the fly traffic shaping. Really now.
ALL in ALL, OOL has *increased* it's value to me, and thereby has made me a happier consumer.
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Bottom line: I WAS VERY IMPRESSED BY BOOST! However, it's fairly obvious that the entire service, regular and especially BOOST is now vastly oversold in many areas, and our speeds are suffering accordingly.
Cablevision's claim to fame is speed, and even that is under question right now. In all seriousness, I find it hard to recommend OOL right now, especially seeing the amount of problems I myself, an experienced long term user have had in a relatively short amount of time.
If you'd rather have good email , good usenet, slower (but stable) speeds, you may want to look elsewhere, particularly at DSL.
Regards,
David
PS Please post any questions via IM. Thanks.
** NOTE - The below screen captures DO NOT reflect my current service or it's state and speeds. I just can't figure out how to delete them for now If you'd like to see my speed test, look at the mentioned threads in the review.
Attachments:
  sb512001.zip 156 bytes
(sb512001.png)
Followup comments:  | | |
StreetSpirit
Good Luck, President Elect Obama
Premium
join:2002-08-13
Roslyn Heights, NY | Re: 15/2 Speeds: Yes Beth, I have it. | |
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StreetSpirit
Good Luck, President Elect Obama
Premium
join:2002-08-13
Roslyn Heights, NY | Re: 15/2 Speeds: AND HATE it. Beth don't waste your money, boost is a bunch of hype. My service is slower than when I had plain 15/2. | |
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Beth64
Time Is An Illusion. Lunchtime Doubly So
join:2003-11-17
Brooklyn, NY
 ·Optimum Online
| Re: 15/2 Speeds: Oh wow.. I'm so sorry...
I'll stick to the "If it works, don't fix it" motto. I'm happy with my speeds and get 13-14 mbit from most speed servers and download sites.
The last thing I want is to sacrifice all of that.
And you're paying *MORE* for this? Excuse me, but I have to giggle 
Shame on you Cablevision.
--
Cheers,Elizabeth."Flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." ~Douglas Adams (3/11/1952-5/11/2001 - Rest In Peace, Celestial Hitchhiker.) | |
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StreetSpirit
Good Luck, President Elect Obama
Premium
join:2002-08-13
Roslyn Heights, NY
·Optimum Online
 ·Verizon Online DSL
| Re: 15/2 Speeds: After swapping out my 5100 for a 5120 I'm getting slightly better speeds and much more overall consistency.
I'm fine if it stays this way.
Dave
[screenies attached] | |
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Good luck in not getting capped. 
