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 Review by rockhopjohn 
Posted: 1.4 years ago
member for 1.5 years, 3 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
 Boise,Ada,ID
 $50 per month
 about 3 days
 "Reliable Service, Free Installation, Local feel when contacting customer/tech service."
 "SEVERE THROTTLING!!!!! Advertised speeds were only available from Midnight to Noon, throttled after that."
 "If you are a low-bandwidth user, this service is fine; high-bandwidth users, know that you will be throttled every day."
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I moved to Boise in August of 2007. I had good experiences with the cable internet services where I lived previously, so I thought I would stick with cable here in Boise. Also I had real issues with DSL reliability in the past, and had heard horror stories about Qwest (my other broadband option), so that made Cable One seem like the logical choice.
I was pretty happy with my service in general, but I had noticed that I had a difficult time getting advertised speeds, especially in the evenings. I also started to use my connection to watch a lot of streaming video (Hulu, Netflix. . .) and noticed that my connection would often slow down considerably half way through a movie. At first I thought it was an overload of local traffic. But then I noticed it would happen very consistently about 1 hour 20 minutes into a movie. Plus the slow down was so great that I would have to back out of the movie, and have Netflix resample at a lower streaming rate so that it would not have to constantly stop the movie to download more data.
This led me to do some research here on DSLReports to try to figure out what might be going on. After a little digging I learned that Cable One was throttling my connection after 1.3 GB of downloaded data, or 130 MB of uploaded data, and the effective speed was cut in half. So after learning this, I decided to contact my local office and see what the dealio was, and why this info had not been made available when I was purchasing my service. The e-mail reply I got was typical sort of BS, and despite a couple of phone calls to follow up, I was never able to speak with someone about the issue.
I wasn't going to just sit here and be ignored. So I called the city of Boise who handles Cable One's franchise within the city and complained that Cable One was duping their customers by not making the information related to their throttling reasonably available (it is available on their website, but very difficult to find if you don't know what to look for). So the city of Boise contacted Cable One, and someone at the local office pushed the panic button, and I was on the phone with the national VP of Internet within two-three days.
In general the VP was unapologetic for how they ran their service, but said he would make attempts to make the throttling policy more available to people before they bought the service. In the end, I switched to Qwest, and have been MUCH happier with the service.
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Review by kaltrop
UPDATED: 1.4 years ago
member for 1.4 years, 1 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
Boise,Ada,ID
$40 per month
about 2 days
"Stays solid for long periods of time, often you get faster speed than advertised. Good spam filters on the mail server."
"Bandwidth controls enabled. When they are down they go down hard. Tech support often stubborn and won't fess up to problems."
"Basically they are as good as can be expected with a couple nice extras"
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I've got a 'fair warning' on this review because I just joined. I've been using this site since about 2000, and I've worked in the I.T. industry for a decade. I've been a broadband subscriber since 1999.
Cableone.net...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------
Cost:
1.5 mbps ~$40
3.0 mbps ~$80
I've been with Cableone.net in Boise for over three years. For the most part, they've been just fine. The service stays up almost all the time. There have been three or four instances in the past four years where they have some major problems. Average time for outage was maybe 6-8 hours. This year there was one horrific problem in which for whatever reason if you were playing World of Warcraft, you kept getting booted off the servers. I have a large group of friends who play this in the area and we verified that when one cableone subscriber got booted, we all did. Players who had other ISPs did not experience the issue. This want on for a while over a period of maybe a month or more.
This brings me to probably my main beef with these guys - when you call their tech support they are so stubborn. They will almost never admit there is a problem when it's obvious there is one. They won't even log a ticket for you. They apparently assume that it will never happen that a customer identifies a problem before they will. It's really frustrating. Generally when there's a complete outage they will never admit that there is one, so you just have to decide you aren't going to use the internet until later.
Aside from that, they've employed bandwidth increase programs a couple times, and often users will get higher speeds than they've signed up for. For speeds of 3mbps it seemed like I was getting up to 5mpbs more often than not. I've had to scale back to 1.5mbps recently, and at that speed I seem to be getting exactly 1.5mpbs so maybe it's just at the higher unthrottled speeds that you get the extra speed bonuses.
They advertise that they throttle your bandwidth after a certain amount of bandwidth used over time, which isn't really something I like to see. Honestly though, I've never seen it implemented and I use a lot of bandwidth all the time.
One final note about email - they have some nice simple little web tools to manage email accounts. I have had ISPs before where you had to call in to get new mailboxes, which was a pain. Also, they have a very good spam blocker on their mail server. I seldom ever get spam, but when I check the mail spam holding area, there's always tons of spam captured. False positives are very rare, from my personal experience.
So in closing, cableone is probably the best thing going in the Boise area. There may be some DSL providers that are better but cableone is easy to find and easy to get set up with. Overall I give them a B to B+.
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Review by stubs2
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 1.5 years, 0 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
Boise,Ada,ID
$50 per month
"Friendly customer service"
"Bandwidth limit"
"Avoid if possible!"
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I've been a customer for a few years, and don't have many complaints... until now. I've been playing with a large internet stores digital rental service for a week now, and have been renting movies to download and watch. Just found out that hard way that this just isn't practical because Cableone puts download caps on you you exceed a certain amount of data downloaded a day!!!!! What a stupid policy! Legal digital downloads are finally a viable alternative and now my ISP is playing traffic cop. All I can say is DSL, here I come!
Followup comments:  XuR
join:2008-07-30
Mesa, AZ
| Yup Hopefully other ISP's dont start doing the same thing. Since day one look at the history of humanity. ALWAYS people trying to control and put limitation on other people. And Eyah CableOne obviously does not care if your capped and trying to stream netflix. They just don't care. | |
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 Review by PolarBear
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 4.9 years, 1269 visits, last login: 55 days ago
Clarkston,Asotin,WA
$56 per month
about 14 days
"No downtime in 9 months."
"They throttle if you download over a 1GB, but only between 12:00 and 00:00."
"Great service, great value!"
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Took a little while for the install, but I ordered it a week before I moved in anyway, so I didn't have to wait that long.
I currently pay for the 4000/400 service, and every speed test I have run says I get 5600 down and over 500 up. Can't complain about that! I don't know what my latency is (I don't game), but I have never had a problem with my Vonage service or T-Mobile @home service over it, so obviously the latency isn't a problem.
About a week after install, I got up in the morning and the modem wouldn't sync, and nothing I tried helped. I called at 10am, and they said someone would be out to look at it by 5pm, the SAME DAY! A tech came out, quickly deduced that the problem was not on my end, climbed the pole, and replaced a faulty connection on the tap. No charge to me.
Also, the staff that answer the phone at the local office are always really nice.
My other options in this area are Qwest DSL and Clearwire. Since I already had Vonage, I had no need for Qwest to force a landline on me. And since I am not a millionaire, I would have had to sign a 2 year contract with Clearwire - yeah right!
Modem is a Moto SB5100. Install was easy - since I was still moving in, I just had the tech hook it up to the only live outlet in the house to my laptop, then later on I installed an outlet where I wanted it (I used to be a DirecTV installer, so I know how to run RG6).
UPDATE 05JUN2008:
Haven't noticed an outage in 9 months. Have had to reset the modem twice in 9 months (that's awesome!). I get exactly the speeds advertised (10-25% higher on the upload).
They DO throttle, but only between the hours of 12:00 and 00:00, and only if you download over 1GB during those hours, so I can't even complain about that. I just turn Azureus on when I go to bed, and off when I get up in the morn.
I would like faster upload speeds, as I think CableOne has the lowest upload speeds of any cable ISP in the nation. Paying $100 for the SOHO option just to get decent uploads isn't worth it.
Overall, however, I am still satisfied with the service.
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Review by tarawa
Posted: 1.5 years ago
member for 2.1 years, 38 visits, last login: 1.4 years ago
Diamondhead,Hancock,MS
$43 per month
"HORRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE"
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Had intermittent connectivity for a few weeks. Called Tech Support. They say need to schedule a service call. Next available appt is over a week away!! AND it's an ALL DAY appt at that. Week goes by, appt day comes and tech NEVERS SHOWS! We even called the local CableOne office TWICE to ask our status. Was told "we're in the system and we'll call when we are on our way." Come 7 PM and STILL NOTHING. I called back again and was asked if a note was left on our door. No... Someone has been home all day - they better not have left a note. Well, after a few minutes on hold, I'm now told that my appt has been rescheduled! WTF?!?! No call, no explanation, no nothing. I get transferred to the internet troubledesk and they elevate my call to an emergency and that enables the "on-call" tech to make an after hours call. He shows up around 8:30 pm and corrects they problem within a half-hour (bad corroded splitter outside in the cable junction box.)
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Review by risingFish
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 4.5 years, 2 visits, last login: 1.5 years ago
Boise,Ada,ID
$55 per month
"Is able to reach where DSL can't yet."
"Cable Internet always going down, high prices for so-so transfer speeds"
"Get Qwest DSL if you can, and only use Cable absolutely have to."
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I first got broadband about 6 years ago through Qwest. The service was rock solid, and I can only recall one outtage which it didn't last for very long. I bought my own house about 3 1/2 years ago, and didn't find out until moving in that I could not get DSL. The only viable alternative was Cableone's cable internet, which I promptly signed up for. For the first couple years, it was releatively solid, but still went down from time to time. In the past year, however, I get an average of 4-6 outages a week. Some last as long as a couple hours, and some only 5-10 minutes. I've made multiple calls to the company, and they have sent repair guys out a couple times, but I am still getting the outages. The last guy mentioned a weak signal, so I just bought a bi-directional amplifier to hopefully fix it. I'm not hold my breath, and am planning on switching back to DSL if it ever becomes available. ( I live in the middle of Boise, and can't get DSL... go figure ) Reading previous post about over selling their network seems to make sense considering the gradual degradation in quality.
5/19/2008
Thought it was time to update this review after a couple years. To be completely honest my view of Cableone was getting improving. They seem to of ironed out all their connection issues and the service has been getting better with time. The bandwidth increases have been nice along road. All of that changed in the last couple months. First they dropped newsgroup service, and now I'm reading about the bandwidth shaping. The newsgroups I can live without (Google conveniently indexes them), but the bandwidth shaping is just asinine. As far as I am concerned these guys are scum. I do not need my ISP playing big brother to my internet habits. Please Qwest! Hook me up with DSL! The minute you flip the switch I will happily drop Cableone!
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 Review by Mercurybird
UPDATED: 1.5 years ago
member for 5.4 years, 2633 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Nash,Bowie,TX
$29 per month
"Smooth, uninterupted service. Rock solid and reliable. No hicups."
"I have no complaints."
"I'm sticking with them. They are trying hard to be the best here in the Texarkana area."
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I ordered 3000/300 for $29.95 a month.
The order process was great in light of my own foot dragging. I didn't want the cable on the outside of the house we're renting. Neither did our landlord. So I told them I wanted it in the attic, dropped in each room, down the wall. But I didn't want to pay an additional installation fee for that. So they told me to calculate how much cable, and how many splitters, etc. I would need. Then I could call them and they would get it all together for me, for free.
They did just that. I figured 150', and they cut me 160'. I had 10' of cable left when I got it run. Then a guy came out promptly and terminated and tested everything. I asked him to give the modem a direct run from the pole. But no luck.  So I asked him to send the first split to the modem and then the TVs. Then bitta-bing-bitta-boom I was online. It just took me a while to get off of my butt and get the cable run. I cut the 10' leftover piece in two and asked him to terminate them for me, and he did.
All my modem responses are in spec. They also offer up to 5mb here. What's good about that is there are no slowdowns reported with that speed. So I'm not worried about slowdowns with my 3mb. I had asked them about that because I had always heard about the so called "up to" the advertised speed with cable. But I haven't noticed any slowdowns here.
Before getting cable I had ADSL 1.5/512. What I have now is consistently twice that in surfing and in downloads. We're happy campers.
I had bought a Motorola SB5120 to use with their service. I have it hooked to a DLink DI-704P router. I'm not certain but I think it is DynamicIP.
The one thing I was bummed about, and it isn't their fault, is that my Smoothwall system will not work with it. It should work no different than it did with ADSL, but... The modem works, and the connectibility is there. But Cableone can't see who I am. So I took ole Smoothie out of the mix. It's just as well, I wanted a new motherboard anyway, so I bought a DFI LANparty UT nF3 250Gb. It has the Nvidia hardware firewall built-in. Hopefully I won't have the same trouble with that hardware firewall. I'll let you know here.
The reason for my less than perfect score on the tech support was because I thought they should have been able to help me with the Smoothwall problem. But maybe they had never heard of it. So they told me to contact the Smoothwall people. So I thought that was reasonable.
==============================
Okay, October 30th... Smoothwall is now working flawlessly with the modem/router CableOne.net setup. Speed results are excellent. No problems still.
==============================
Okay, September 28th... This is a late long time in coming update. I pulled the Smoothwall system and installed the NVidia motherboard. The hardware firewall is playing nice with the cable modem.
I also asked them if they were planning any local speed upgrades, because Windstream DSL in our area is upgrading their customers to 6mbits. They sent me back the canned answer of "Due to the nature of your question it would be better if you called our tech support line". I just blew it off, you know, you get what you get. Why fight it? Two days later I noticed a big jump in speed. Sure enough, they upgraded me to 5000/500. Now how about that?!
Like I said- they're working hard to be the best in our area. Why didn't they bump me up to 6mbits you ask? The highest speed they offer is 5 mbits. So they probably don't have anything faster yet. You will notice that I was originally getting the 3000/300 for $29.00. Normally the $29.00 only gets you the 1.5mbits speed. But because I got it with a bundle they kicked in the 3000/300. Well now they've bumped me up to 5000/500. And still no increase on the cost.
So I'm telling you all this to let you know that CableOne is working hard in my area to be the best they can. I know you know that CableOne is a big company with regional offices. But how well they perform for you comes down to the local office in your area. Well, let me say that I don't at all know who controls the speed- local or the home office. But I can certainly vouch for what I've seen. 
This message was written by Mercurybird not CableOne. Just PM me and ask if you doubt it.
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Review by (hidden by request)
Posted: 1.5 years ago
(review was emailed from domain netzero.net)
Boise,Ada,ID
$39 per month
"Decent pings, Close to advertised speed until threshold hit"
"Low bandwidth caps, service turns off before bills are due, slower penalty speeds than advertised"
"The best of Boise's absolutely mediocre broadband offerings"
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CableOne Boise City (Ada County)
Advertised Speed 3.0MB Down 300 Kbps up
advertised price $39.99 + absurd $6 per month modem lease (don't
expect to bring your own, compatible modems don't work when all is
said and done)
I am quite disappointed with my CableOne service. Unfortunately, it is
the only service available that has even mediocre/decent ping speeds
in the area without signing up for a ridiculous phone contract with
FUSF and all the damn taxes associated with DSL. You know the drill
$30 internet access unused phone line $15.00+ $17.25 in taxes. The
other option is unthinkable... The infamous Clearwire wireless. So I
have to suffer with poor performance and frequent outages with
Cableone. So let me detail why the service is good and then why it is
bad. With Cableone I get nearly my advertised speed 2400kbps down and
more than 300kbps up but with one major caveat. So that leads into the
bad... There are bandwidth caps imposed on users of Cableone Internet
services, and they are lower in my experience than the posted numbers.
I am supposed to be able to download up to 1350 MB per day during peak
hours before I am restricted to Standard speeds (1.5MB/150kb). In
reality my numbers are closer to 700MB before bandwidth caps go into
effect and the standard speed is nowhere near the number listed on the
terms and conditions page. When I am restricted it drops to between
430kb-750kb down and 150 up. This is really annoying when I am
watching Netflix movies online. It stops towards the end of a movie
and then has to buffer constantly for the last half hour. The
bandwidth cap is simply too low for average residential users, and the
penalty rate (actual) is too severe. Now for the other problems. Don't
expect to avoid the $6.00 modem rental. I bought a perfectly fine
cable modem on their preferred list, and they provisioned it, but it
would never establish connection despite having good signal strength.
Add the $6.00/mo modem and voila it works just peachy. Then and this
is truly annoying... I get my statement in the mail with a due date of
say 4/25/08 well the company turns off service 3 days before my first
bill's due date and demands payment to continue allowing me to use the
service. That is ridiculous! And the customer service is only open
from 8-5 MDT. No one else can help you but the local office, and only
during business hours!
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Review by swarto112
UPDATED: 1.6 years ago
member for 5.8 years, 1157 visits, last login: 7 days ago
Boise,Ada,ID
$120 per month
"ease of service, VOIP phone service great"
"cost, internet is slow, anemic HDTV channels"
"is a decent service but cost needs to drop"
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I have used all levels of the service and have currently scaled back to just standard cable with my own Tivo. Their DVR is OK but the tuner part was superb as the pictures were excellent on standard definition. I also have their phone service and its been great. The internet service is the part I'm disappointed in as I am not a guzzler but I am on quite a lot. The HDTV selection is very low in fact more than half the selection is available over the air. Cost is a factor after the six months is up: no frills cable is over $46, phone is $32, internet is $32. It's cheaper to get satellite and Qwest back...go figure! Better channel selection and the DSL is rock solid as well as reasonably fast with a better consistency rate.
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Review by rtazz1
Posted: 1.6 years ago
member for 8.6 years, 1123 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Friendship,Crockett,TN
Contract price not specified.
"Steady Quality, Friendly customer service"
"local office; after hour service access, metered use for 12 hours a day"
"Great product,"
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I have the basic tv package no cablebox, don't need it to watch their HD channels (not the pay channels) 8Mb/500k internet. price is about avg for this package have seen it cheaper in larger cities. but Im in small town TN. All told I feel like I do get my monies worth. I dont care for their manner of network management ie: metering your use between noon and midnight caps are fairly low.
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CableOne
(12)
(11)
to much signal is bad for the modem
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Got a price increase notice and pulled the plug on the whole thing. No more cale tv, cable internet and cable voip. Got direct tv, ported my number to a third line with AT&T and use it for data at the house as well. What you say... you can do that? Yes, if you use a data plan of anykind you can either back door it using things like Motorola Phone Tools which hop you right on the data network by clicking a button or you can get a 3G wifi router. My Tivo and Direct TV dvrs pull data down just fine and the family cruises the internet no problems. That being said, I wont be doing any file sharing soon. I could always borrow the neighbors if I really needed but people dont realize that cell phone companies are gearing up their networks to take away business from the cable cos.