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I been on my apartment for 3 years and Optimum is the only ISP available in my apartment complex. I had more than 20 service calls including plant technicians for outside work without any solution. My problem is really simple: JITTER. I exclusively use the highest tier on coax for streaming/gaming. While my service reach desired speeds and ping is low the MAJOR issue that affects EVERYTHING is the delay of packets to be received specifically during peak hours: 11a, 5p, 7p and 9pm. While gaming on the mentioned hours, there is delay, stuttering and bad connection. While many people directly blame servers/game type the issue is the network itself. Either node oversold, maintenance not being conducted, upgrades not being performed accordingly. Optimum does NOT want to take action on this, neither recognize the problem since it's easy to blame on my wiring or equipment even though techs say everything is good on the internal side. Having one internet service provider, no fiber availability should be completely banned, specially on multi unit buildings. As a customer with only one thing to do with the service subscribed it represents a big problem with no immediate solution. Optimum has failed me on every single aspect. member for 2.2 years, 428 visits, last login: a few hours ago lodged 10 days ago
my review is based on dslreports sample questions: Q) What package did you order, at what advertised monthly price? A) Internet Only Q) How was the order & install process? A) quick & easy Q) What brand/model was the supplied equipment? A) GR140DG in bridge mode, using my own router & access point Q) What good or bad experiences most struck you? A) nothing, install went as stated and service is stable unlike our experience with Optimum coax wan update: at 13 months in NO complaints on the service itself member for 23.4 years, 9587 visits, last login: a few hours ago updated 140 days ago
Been using this service for over 10 years. A few years ago the name changed to Optimum, but the service & connection remain the same. I started with much lower speeds and have tried their highest connection, but did not see the benefit for the extra cost. Connection is better than 95% reliable overall, but does not deserve 'best' rating. Support has generally been ok. I hate the 'follow the script' and computer switchboard operator, but that is common in this industry. Techs have always been nice and helpful. Service scheduling is a little long, but not too bad. I have always provided my own equipment and that has lead to a few hiccups in the past, but lately it has not been an issue. I do not use their tv services. We can watch multiple video streams at the same time and upload/download do not seem to lag noticeably. We do not stream at 4k though, as our screens don't use that resolution anyway. Overall, I have been please with everything about this service except the price, especially after the "new customer" discount ended a year after changing speed tiers. member for 22 years, 5332 visits, last login: 74 days ago updated 143 days ago
Update: 8/26/2023 My wish came true. I am now a happy subscriber of TM 5G Home Internet. Great signal. Getting more than 3 times the downstream speed, and 8 times the upstream speed since switching, and it costs less. Optimum, it was nice knowing you 20 years ago when the Dolans owned the company. Now it's an overpriced wasteland and mishmash of additional fees, surcharges, etc.. I have been a customer since Optimum moved into this area in 2003 after buying the local privately owned Matamoras Video Cable Company, and setting up their small footprint in Pennsylvania. Things were great back them. For the time, their speeds were about the best you could get via cable modem. Service was fairly priced and very reliable. At that time I also subscribed to TV which was also priced reasonably. I rented the necessary boxes, they provided the modem for free. "Triple Play" was never available in this area due to some state regulation (Pennsylvania), or I would have subscribed to that, too. All in all I was very pleased and felt lucky to have such good service. Everything was great throughout the 2000s. I bought into a couple of enhanced speed levels which they offered like "Boost, Optimum 60, Optimum 100, Optimum 200". Not being avid television viewers, and no longer having children at home, the wife and I began exploring ways to economize. We aren't gamers or file sharers, so higher speed wasn't very important to us. The additional fees and surcharges; modem rental fee, premium outlet fee for each box, and the increasing cable box rental fee (despite lackluster performance) drove up the bill far higher than the value we were actually using. We decided at that point to switch to Broadcast Basic, so we could at least receive the news and whatever else was in that tier. It was fairly priced at the time. We ditched the Optimum boxes and went with Samsung Smart Media boxes which supported Cable Card. We also downgraded our internet package to Optimum 20 (or 25 depending where you saw your service tier listed, on the printed bill it was one thing, on the site it was another). Not long after this, the company decided to institute a surcharge on Broadcast Basic so it effectively doubled in price. We kept the Broadcast Basic package despite the price gouging. We bought our own modem to remove the $10.00/mo. rental fee. The next round of gouging is when the price for Optimum 20 more than doubled. It was at this point we decided to cancel the Broadcast Basic package, return the Cable Cards and just rough it without television. Things went swimmingly for a while. Then the other shoe dropped--- Without warning our Optimum 20 plan was taken away, and were slammed into the Optimum 100 tier. In January 2022 our bill was increased another $10.00. When I got wind of this I spoke to a rep and attempted to get my old level of service restored. I was transferred to a retention rep and she said she would try to get a code to give me back my old service. Then she said she couldn't do it, but being the loyal customer I was, she would drop my bill $20.00 for the year, and that was the best she could do. Now at that moment I was getting 100/35. I know because I tested it. After accepting the offer my upload speed was dropped to 5 mbps. No mention was made of this decrease when it was offered. I tried for days to get the upload cap rescinded to no avail. I was referred to an Altice Executive Service rep. He was clueless. He needlessly had a truck rolled out to my house because he insisted the loss of upload speed was on my end, and that the tech could restore the upload speed. This tied me up for most of a day. Of course the tech couldn't do anything. My signal levels were perfect, my modem and wiring, too. There are no splitters to my modem. After hearing this the Executive rep just cut me loose telling me I am stuck being capped at 5mbps up. This lopsided speed makes uploading email attachments an abomination in slowness. Even a 1 Mb photo is excruciatingly slow to send. Altice knows they have us by the short hairs (for the time being, anyway). I'm sick of playing whack-a-mole with this company. As soon as a viable option becomes available I'm gone. 5G home internet service is on the Verizon, er, I mean horizon. If you have any other alternative than using these shysters I urge you jump at it. They treat their longstanding customers like dirt. member for 20.5 years, 2067 visits, last login: 1 day ago updated 205 days ago
member for 23.4 years, 1539 visits, last login: 1 year ago lodged 1 year ago
They sure have flubbed it now. member for 1.4 years, 2 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago lodged 1.4 years ago
Really dissatisfied with my Optimum service. Initially, I was glad to see that they offered a gigabit package in my neighborhood. The service is quite unreliable though. When the service isn't in a full outage, which happens several times a month, it's in need of constant equipment reboots due to slow speeds, high ping times, and dropped packets. They have a policy of not activating customer modem equipment on the gigabit plan. This, of course, is not a technical limitation, it's simple a business policy that is extremely unfriendly to their customers. Their customer service is absolutely terrible. Technical reps who are absolutely clueless, don't really listen to the customer, and promise call backs that consistently never arrive. I should note, however, that I have had positive experiences with all the on-site techs that have visited the house; they have been on-time, polite, and knowledgable. member for 1.6 years, 70 visits, last login: 305 days ago lodged 1.6 years ago
So Altice changed our ISP from Suddenlink to Optimum on 8/1/2022. Nothing actually changed, except the website access for billing, and perhaps some slightly better customer support. We're still stuck with the same old, decrepit infrastructure, with continual promises that fiber to the home is coming soon...maybe if you are in NY/NJ, but not anywhere else. Ping times are getting higher, I have noticed over the last few months, and my upload speed seems to throttle or choke down every few minutes. Also, I have to keep home phone service to keep my internet price down, which seems pretty dopey to me. member for 16.2 years, 1270 visits, last login: a few hours ago lodged 1.6 years ago
1/12/2022 -- I think I shot myself in the foot here. That said, I'm also an unhappy customer. Please see my reviews of Frontier Fiber and Verizon FiOS. If you have an alternative, you probably want to steer clear of this product. If you need support, it will be difficult and painful to get. Altice has two plants, a Fiber plant where things are generally good to best and a coax plant where things range from bad to very good. Until two days ago, my experience was the very good side. How I shot myself in the foot: I got a new Fiber connection from Frontier and tried to configure things to send my server traffic out Optimum and my web surfing traffic out Frontier. I think I mixed the streams and got put into some group of misbehaving customers at Optimum. I'm an unhappy customer because getting out of purgatory is difficult to impossible. I've been working with tech support for 5 hours. I've been honest with them about what I did. I would have expected a scolding but instead, the techs are just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. My dealings with tech support have made it clear that dropping Optimum is my best option. This is sad because this review is a testament to my history with this service and this service used to be really really good. 10/27/2021 -- Service remains unchanged but only because I'm grandfathered into the older uploads. Altice has promised that If I change my service, this will also change. My latest review reflects Altice's contempt for their HFC customers who are stuck on Coax until the Altice Fiber buildout reached their homes. There was no technical reason for Altice to change upload speeds here as the majority of customers that they were gaining represented churn. For me service during COVID has been good. In two years I may have had a problem with once video conference that turned out to be on my side. Honestly I'd patiently wait and stay with Altice until they get fiber to my house but for the fact that their latest actions are hostile to customers. The Frontier Line crew was out measuring my street fro fiber last week. At this rate, whoever gets fiber to my house first wins. 6/7/2021 -- Service has been good, but not great during Covid-19. More short outages than usual especially in the pass few months. Enough so that I have my Cell connection setup as a backup now. 1/25/2021 -- Updated my modem. The old one had trouble hitting my max speeds. The new one is DOCSIS 3.1 and hits max speeds without trouble. 12/17/2020 -- A good service but Altice has disposed of most of the shine that CableVision gave the OOL product. The TV service is expensive. With the Online product it's difficult to get to customer service which leads to service problems. Under Covid-19 the mode is one of your neighbors conflating their WiFi problems with an OOL issue and then causing a truck roll, then downtime for me. At best this causes momentary issues, at worst, it creates an opportunity to break things that weren't broken. 04/26/2020 -- Upgraded to 400/40 Getting 388/42 ~ 401/42 in the midst of Covid-19. Very happy. 11/09/2018 -- Getting a steady 305/37.5 these days. Smooth sailing. 01/21/2018 -- System upgrades have taken the speed to 300/35. The service works well. 07/16/2016 -- Upgraded modem. Speeds still good but a speed increase would be nice. 03/28/2016 -- Speed test show a small drop in speeds since 09/2015. Service would be better with native IPv6; A hobbyist level static IPv4 address is worth $5 ~ 10/month to me; The web site has become disorganized and a few options are hard to find; Server quality, ping times and jitter, are nice but others are catching up on speed and you can see it in the DSLReports speed tests. 09/11/2015 -- Speed test results have been consistently good for months. Great Service if a a little pricy. Any or all of: Native IPv6; a hobbyist level static IP; Bandwidth bump; Upload bump; would be welcome. 04/29/2015 -- Adding some speed tests dslreports: »[Cable Speed test: 105.37/22.92 18 ms] speedtest.net: »www.speedtest.net/my-res ··· 25044679 04/05/2015 -- Speeds holding steady at 118+ Down / 38+ Up at speedtest.net. QoS and my router are certainly part of the speed ratings for me. I've recently set the router to rate limit at 122 Down, / 42 Up and prioritize certain upstream traffic, (TCP ACKs, etc) based on best condition max speeds. The goal there is to avoid bufferbloat but that's not relevant to my review. Thanks go to Cablevision for great service. Let's hear something about IPv6 though. 01/30/2015 -- Still great speeds. Grandfathering all the original Boost customers into Ultra has been awesome. I measure 118 Mbit/s Down and 38+ Mbit/s up. We are heavy users of streaming video in this house and nothing phases this connection. Still no IPv6 which is a bit of a downer but the IP address is very stable so setting up a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel is not a problem. The only thing I'm unhappy about is the price. Most of my complaint there isn't about the internet, it's TV. 07/14/2013 -- I'm reviewing Cablevision's Optimum Boost internet connectivity on July 14th, 2013. Tomorrow they will officially rename this service Optimum Ultra. The service is pricey but Cablevision (CV) has been pretty good at responding to competition. For me that means a speed increase from a service sold as: 50Mb/s down / 8Mb/s up and provisioned as 58+ down / 8 up to a service 101+ down /35 up. As a consumer of high def streaming video I'm very happy with CV's Optimum Online product. member for 21.2 years, 2369 visits, last login: 3 days ago updated 2.1 years ago
Update 12/24/21I never updated this during the beginning of Covid, but at that time getting through to Customer Service was horrid. As of 12/24/2021: Internet was off and on all weekend. Finally reached out via chat, nothing but frustration. Tried getting a live person several time on the phone and got hung up on when they said there was an outage in our area. Then there were two technicians in my building who said they were working on it. They left while I was out, it was still busted.I finally got someone who kept reassuring me that everything was fine. No it's not fine, I can't use the service I pay for nor can anyone in my 6 floor apartment building. This person said my router was bad and to go replace it. UGHHH. The following evening, the TV went out. Now when I call and say TV is out I get a person with an actual brain. She says she can see an issue and a tech needs to come out to look at the outside of the building and they will BRING equipment in case my box or router are bad when they finish. Now I get an email saying my new cable box is shipping for $11 charge. WTAF I did not tell them I wanted that. Anyway during the day today all of a sudden everything is working fine, someone in the building said there were techs here today. I am done. FiOS is ordered internet only. They are coming Monday, got a great deal, free install, free internet for a month, hoping this time they don't price gouge going forward. Update 8/20 Since Altice took over this company it has gone downhill, especially the customer service. Trying to connect to a person on the phone is an endeavor not for the faint of heart and if you do get someone generally they do not know what they are talking about. The bulk of the support is overseas and they have no idea what is actually going on as far as equipment returns, availablity, etc. Not blaming the reps, just a total lack of communication on the company's end. The only other local option is FIOS, if I end up going back to them I am cutting the chord altogether and just getting internet. Just not worth haggling between these two monopolies anymore with all the other available streaming options New update 1/16/2015. I left for FIOS a few years back due to pricing. When FIOS kept going up I came back. I am very happy to be back for several reasons. 1: If you need to do anything via the web it works great unlike Verizon's site. Check voicemail, make any changes to it, DVR recording or deleting. Ditto the iOS app. It all works as expected. Nice to be back to that. 2: With FIOS I was unable to stream Netflix through my Smart TV during primetime. Just buffered. Weird that I could use other methods such as Chromecast or Playstation3. Anyway with Optimum it works fine anytime primetime included. 3: It is nice not have to go to the high channels to get to the normal ABC,CBS and NBC in high def. Cons: Multiroom DVR is not something I need because I live in a studio apartment with one TV. However if you want to not have it your only choice is an older out of date box. And the MRDVR is $5 more a month. And the interface needs some software updates badly, such as no back button for live TV and the FF is really subpar. OLDER:Another update, all has been back to excellent since the last incident. Like I said if you don't have a problem they are wonderful. This is an updated review, leaving my old one from about 1997 below. Service has been great all this time, no problems although they raised the price, there is nothing comparable in my area and no complaints until....... Two weeks ago cable was SLOW and digital TV was unwatchable, voip was out too. This was a problem in my entire building of 70 apartments, probably at least 90% with cable, the remaining either no tv or bad reception as there is no satellite. From Thursday to Sunday numerous people (at least a dozen that I am sure of) called and were told that there wasn't a building wide problem, they could not see that all these people were calling and had service call appointments. FINALLY on Sunday one support women said she would report it to engineering...and it started working around Noon. Monday there were four trucks outside and they said they had to replace the main cable going into the building. HUGE LACK OF communication within the company for the poor support folks to not be able to see that there was a trend of callers from the building and get it looked at sooner. So, bottom line when it's up and running I have no complaints, but they need to get their act together as far as internal communication. OLD REVIEW FROM FIRST INSTALL I thought I wanted DSL and kept waiting for Bell Atlantic to let me know it was available in my area. When Optimum started advertising their "install it yourself" policy I decided to give it a try. I had an inside deal on a 3Com modem ( a gift) so I setup an install date for the cable line ( I didn't have cable tv in my house)The guy came and ran the cable, I plugged it in.....and it worked right away. I've had it for almost a year now and there has been only one outage, my IP address has changed only once. I just ran the 3 speed tests here: Test running.......... ** Speed 3865(down)/719(up) kbps ** (At least 77 times faster than a 56k modem) Finish. That was the fastest, the other two were 49 times faster and 22 times faster. When they are going to be doing work on the email servers they notify you. I had a problem with my IP address not doing reverse DNS after it changed, the phone support people were not the best, so I sent email. Nick L who handled my case was SUPERB!! He got the situation taken care of, and sent me a follow up email on a Sunday to make sure everything was working properly. And other emails I have sent with questions have been handled by a live person, not a canned response. I am extremely happy with the level of customer support I have recieved.Other then the reverse DNS problem they haven't been of a technical nature but were all answered in a timely fashion and I didn't feel like the responses were generic. I never had cable tv installed because in the past when I had it I wasn't thrilled, but since the modem service I decided to get TV service too, they split the line for that and I haven't noticed a difference in speed or connection. Since I provided the modem I didn't sign a contract. Reading some of the reviews here I was surprised, however here in Long Beach I am THRILLED with OOL!! member for 24 years, 2888 visits, last login: 2.2 years ago updated 2.2 years ago
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