Sparklight → Can it really get this bad?

I finally bit the bullet and dropped Qwest as my ISP because they could not even provide me service well enough to get google to show at times.

So i decide to go with cable one. In Rio Rancho, NM the offer the 12mb service. Even though I think it is overpriced ($83/month) I signed up. Since then I run my speed tests and everything looks great intranet, but when you look at internet speeds It is horrible. I sometimes get 1/2Mb down but I usually bounce between 3-6Mb down. As far as uploads they have been great 1.5-4Mb I have even hit 5Mb up. Yet I can only get 3-6Mb Down on a 12Mb boost to 20Mb service? By the way I just got a brand new SB6120 DOCIS 3.0 modem So equipment on my end is not the issue. When I do a trace route I see that everything goes through TWTELCOM in Denver, CO. I am starting to think that cable one sells you the 12Mb service but the lines they lease from TWTELCOM cut your bandwidth before it goes anywhere. The techs in Arizona have told me there is nothing wrong with there lines and they cannot guarantee what I get outside there network. Hmmm sounds like Cable one is just scamming there customers.

Tom

Speed Results

There were 2 or 3 downtimes due to upgrades in a last month or two in Rio Rancho, but no major problems for me. I think that connection got even better for me, because I can get full 10Mb @10Pm. Half a year ago performance during peak hours was worse than that.

Well, there was this issue where my speed would be throttled almost at 4 pm EVERYDAY for about a week until I called in about.. 10 times or more until they submitted it as a ticket and it was fixed later that night. It was really annoying and they couldn't figure it out for a while. I'm getting my 10 meg speeds again though, though I don't get the usual full 10 meg speeds on speakeasy anymore It hovers around 8-9.5 mbit now. Maybe it's my router or something else limiting me.. who knows. Torrents still net me 1.1-1.2 megabytes per second.

Speedtest.net still looks good though.

What I personally think is that you're the victim of an unfortunate capacity problem, that is, if most of your local cableone speed tests show that you're receiving the 12 mbits you're paying for. I'll make an interesting note though; I used to score 10 mbits on most of speakeasy's tests until recently in the past few months, it'd linger around 6-9 mbits, but if I pull up speedtest.net and test some of their servers, I usually get the 10 megs I'm paying for.

I'm not sure what else could be done aside from them doing some adjustments on their side or upgrading their network. In an extremely rare instance you could very well be routed improperly due to a misconfiguration on their side; routing will differ from market to market. For example, if I did a tracert, I'd find that all of the websites I access are routed through Level3, I doubt this is the case though.

If you've done EVERYTHING you could do on your side, changing routers, PCs, setups, etc., there's not really anything else you can do aside from constantly calling tech. support until they can look into the problem. If your first hop outside of your local network (After your modem/router) shows rather high latency, they need to look at it. Just keep calling or switch ISPs. I wish I could offer you more advice.

Has anyone else noticed that this is a thread that is over a month old and has been resurrected without the OP doing so? (No big deal - I am just wondering about this. )

Pfft, the CableOne forums are so inactive that responding to a month old post would still be considered recent.

LOL! Touche, Pashune. You really make a good point. This is a rather dead forum.

In other news.. I wonder why my Name/Avatar section no longer shows my various reviews...? Oh well.

I'd love to know how you other Rio Rancho folks are getting such good ping times (latency). I'm lucky to see under 200ms. I've been on the phone with Rio Rancho cableone's finest techs to no avail. Finally in the last month I'm able to sometimes get 5mbps that I pay for. I've been wanting to upgrade to the 10mbps service but no point in paying extra.

Qwest fiber was supposed to be in Enchanted hills end of Jan, but no go and no ETA. I feel like I'm caught between two of the worst internet providers with no alternatives.

Joel

Sounds generally how I've felt about things until recently, myself. Not that C1 is a "great" ISP - it isn't.. that much is plenty clear to me.

I think my biggest complaint with C1 lately is the frequent outages that have been going on. Most of them seem to happen at night but there are a few now and then during the day when I need to make phone calls through my vonage setup. My signal levels and such are all within range, just seems to happen now and then. A couple of days ago there was an hour outage around 11 am. Modem would acquire downstream and upstream parameters, but wouldn't get online.

Hopefully these outages stop sooner or later..

Other than that, no problems really. Full speeds and good pings.

Given that you're experiencing outages right now, I would optimistically hope that this means that C1 is in the process of upgrading your area's backend equipment to handle DOCSIS 3.0. Do you have a DOCSIS 3.0-capable cable modem by any chance?

Nope. I actually just started using my own SB5101 modem a couple of months ago, so I'm stuck on D2 until I purchase a D3 modem anyway.

In the last outage or two my upstream frequency changed from 29 mhz to 30.54 mhz and my downstream frequency changed briefly to 561 mhz, but returned back to the regular 549 mhz.