 Review by sirsloop 
UPDATED: 334 days ago
member for 5.7 years, 1080 visits, last login: 7 days ago
 Sayreville,Middlesex,NJ
 $49 per month (month by month)
 about 5 days
 "Fast...sometimes...."
 "shit is broke half the time leaving me wondering wny I pay for it. Tech support can kiss my ass,"
 "Great when it works, periods of extremely high packet loss, tech support needs to put down the flip book"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings well below consensus)
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12/27/08
Service down for a week... Merry fucking Christmas. Ive been browsing tethered over my motorola Q for a week which has been surprisingly reliable. Fucking OOL at it again.
5/24/06
A tech came out to my place and replaced the 2nd used SB4200 that I picked up from the parlin store. Speeds are back to normal, packet loss down to >1%, ping times are "optimum". A big kudos goes out to the tech who came to my place. He visited my place at 9am this morning, and called me back a few minutes ago at 7pm for a check up. This is the first hint of stellar tech support from this company. If only everyone was as determined.
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5/23/06
I moved locations and now my new OOL cable service is having problems! Big suprise. So far I have discussed this with my neighbor who is also having problems. I replaced the sb4200 per the OOL tech's request. They will be coming out thursday morning to look over the connection. Looks like I will be forced to miss another morning of work.
btw, the new connection is a blazing 4000kbps download, and 320kbps upload, and if you ever decide to use it the latency shoot up to 500-3000ms, then the cable modem becomes non-responsive after 10-30 minutes.
WHERE IS FIOS??? PLEASE SAVE ME FROM THESE MORONS.
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Well starting about 6 weeks ago I noticed some pretty severe speed drops on download speeds. We're talkin 950Kbps upload, and 35Kbps download. I called OOL and we went through an entire array of troubleshooting steps. I ultimately knew it was an issue with OOL as my DL power levels on my SB4200 were less than impressive and ping plotter tests showed right where the issue was.
Downstream Value
Signal to Noise Ratio 32 dB
Power Level -16 dBmV
I've been running a ping plotter test to my connection at home since before I can remember. Its been running from a Qwest T1 going to my router 12 hops away. Over the last ~6 weeks I've experienced 14% packet loss occuring between the last hop at OOL (67.83.250.41, and my router public IP 24.228.XXX.XXX.
They said they would send out a tech....2 weeks later they show up on a friday at 7pm. Both guys agree theres a problem and tell me they will be back. They didn't fix it right there obviously because it was pitch dark and 7pm on a friday. Why they didnt come earlier or on monday, IDK.
Fast forward *3 weeks* and AT LEAST 10 calls into OOL tech support. No one in tech support seems to know anything about someone coming out to my house. Finally after endless calling into OOL, getting transfered to wrong departments, and generally getting pissed off I get to talk to a manager. YAY! They threw me a bone cause of all of my problems, and said that the case had been issued to some other company to fix.
So last Saturday another dude, apparently a manager, came out to my house and just took a look at the lines on the outside of my house. No work was done. We got a call that night that there would be someone out to my house in 7-10 MORE days. We're at 2 work days so far so we'll see what happens.
I'm not holding my breath and have since added OOL tech support to my SPEED DIAL cause I gotta call them so often. When I need to find their number I never can because my internet connection doesnt work!
I have been a real cable type of guy for the last few years...but after the ridiculous amounts of crap I have had to go through to get some support from OOL - other services are looking a lot prettier.
Ya....and WTH is up with this download stream cap nonsense? Speed tests work great but when you actually go to download something you get throttled. STUPID STUPID STUPID.
I guess this review has been more like a rant...but at this point in time OOL deserves a piss poor review. Get your act together...I CAN'T WAIT FOR FIOS OR BPL IN MY AREA!!!!!
4/19/05:
Cancelled my Cablevision TV service and went with satelitte. Picture is better, more channels, and I'm not giving Cablevision my money any more. When FIOS comes to town I'm going to hack down the cable line attached to my house with a chain saw and drink a tall beer.
More issues with OOL. This time its the signal levels that are low. OOL got the ds power levels within spec, but now the signal to noise ratio on the modem floats around 20-29dbmV from 8am until sometime in the afternoon. Speed tests drop to somewhere around 10kbps download and 100kbps upload...or...not working. Getting OOL to do anything about this is like pulling teeth.
To be fair I love the speeds when the service actually works. You can have the best damn service in the world, but if it breaks and you have a bunch of lazy techs that get through the day with automated responses....people are gonna cancel.
UPDATE 6/19
More problems with OOL. They were working suprisingly well for the past month or so. At any rate, now all weekend speeds are considerably lower, theres been intermittent web page and email access. Ping plotter test shows not *USUALLY* a DNS issue, although I stopped using OOL dns servers after this weekend because I was running into problems with them as well. Ping plotter shows my traces getting to hop 4, within OOL, and dropping. Called em, emailed em yesterday morning. This is being reported by TONS of people, and its been 48 hours with no resolution. BLEH.
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