Cable/Internet Problems - Advice Appreciated. Thanks!

Hey there-I also have TW cable and internet, and I didn't experience any outages. I live on PPW and 17th.

I'm probably not the best to help you out with the second portion, I'm sorry.

basically, you are stuck with time warner until verizon fios comes into the are, which should be around 2525.

I also use them for my business.
had twc in the slope for two years... the last year has been filled with intermittent outages, service calls, replaced lines, couplers, etc. (common theme: lo-signal) ...
yet, everytime, they propose a unique theory... yesterday they came to replace the modem (they didn't) and spent 1 hour climbing all over the building trying to find a problem. Finally, the tech said it was because they are doing a lot of upgrades in the area ... my translation: park slope has extremely dense home internet users per capita (and growing) and twc can't handle the load. So, when signing up with twc, expect to buy into an outdated and slowly crumbling infrastructure ... welcome to nyc.

Can any of the long-term PS residents confirm this - it wasn't always TWC serving Park Slope?

The reason I ask is that I had a tech come out about a year ago due to intermittent problems - turns out that the splitters in my backyard were ancient, and shorting out every time it rained - the wires themselves weren't much better. The tech mentioned that a lot of the house-to-house infrastructure was really quite old, and installed by a different company decades ago. Needless to say, he didn't replace the wiring, since the signal improved enough once the splitters were replaced.

Might well be that TWC & its' techs are playing the 'good enough' game when it comes to fixing exterior wiring issues.

I have lived here for almost 22 years and the only cable company ever here was TWC.

Verizon DSL has been pretty reliable though I assume not as a fast as cable. I also have a free wireless signal (no idea who it belongs to) I use in case of emergencies.

I use Verizon DSL which is so amazingly reliable. My bf has TWC and the outages are just awful. I work at home and can't afford that - I'll sacrifice a bit of speed for a reliable connection.

I have TWC for TV, however (because what else is there), and I will say that wiring and external conditions are just freaking horrific. There are wires DANGLING from the outside of my building. Squirrels eat through the wires frequently. And they often give the wrong cable boxes for your TV. It's a wretched service.

ljnd wrote: I use Verizon DSL which is so amazingly reliable. My bf has TWC and the outages are just awful. I work at home and can't afford that - I'll sacrifice a bit of speed for a reliable connection.

I have TWC for TV, however (because what else is there), and I will say that wiring and external conditions are just freaking horrific. There are wires DANGLING from the outside of my building. Squirrels eat through the wires frequently. And they often give the wrong cable boxes for your TV. It's a wretched service.

that's funny because we had Verizon DSL for about 4 years and it went out constantly! So, we switched to TWC last year, I am not much happier with them.

FiOS won't be available in PS for maybe 3-5 years.
AND DSL speed is just like cable speed. If the network is overloaded, things slow down.
My TWC cable/internet has been very reliable, and when it wasn't I bitched to the city's department in charge of cable franchises and got 2 months of free service.
You can contact either company and see what their deals are for getting the highest speed possible at the least cost. Remember, whether it's cable/DSL/fiber, they're all varied forms of wire/fiber strung on poles, buried in conduits under streets and so on. When you get your service, insist that the wires be in places where YOU want them, not thrown over a roof and so forth.

Just wondered if anyone had ever upgraded their class of service on either cable or DSL to business and found that that made any difference

melanarchy wrote:
This hasn't been true for a long time. Your connection to your Cable Company is now a private connection just like DSL, and just like Cable if the upstream connection that your provider is paying for is swamped your DSL will slow down too.

Are you sure about that? I run speed tests on my lines fairly frequently (once every month or so) and I've never seen my DSL speed deviate at all (not a bit, it's literally always exactly the same), nor do I notice any difference in network speed. On TWC, as I said, I would get different speeds every time I tested, ranging from 10mb (never higher, it was clearly capped at that) and as low as 750kb, certain times of day would consistently test higher than others. I suppose that could be attributed to the basic network backbone of TWC, but if that's the case they have some very serious issues, and at the end of the day results in the same thing; Verizon provides me with extremely consistent network access, while TWC was notably unreliable.

(I'll note that it's possible, even likely, that what I experience could be in direct contrast with what others experience. Oddities of wiring, etc. can result in drastically different experiences for different locations, I'm just saying that if you're unhappy with one service, there is the possibility that the other may serve your needs better. Personally I hated TWC for their poor service and even worse technicians (as noted above and in other similar threads), but I'm sure Verizon can be just as bad. I've simply not had to deal with their service department a single time in the 16 months I've been a customer)

I am mystified by the problems others are reporting about TWC. We have not had outages, slowdowns, or any other problems with internet or cable tv, other than DVR boxes and remote control units needing to be periodically replaced.

jahverson wrote:
Are you sure about that? I run speed tests on my lines fairly frequently (once every month or so) and I've never seen my DSL speed deviate at all (not a bit, it's literally always exactly the same), nor do I notice any difference in network speed. On TWC, as I said, I would get different speeds every time I tested, ranging from 10mb (never higher, it was clearly capped at that) and as low as 750kb, certain times of day would consistently test higher than others. I suppose that could be attributed to the basic network backbone of TWC, but if that's the case they have some very serious issues, and at the end of the day results in the same thing; Verizon provides me with extremely consistent network access, while TWC was notably unreliable.

It's true that when you have dsl your pair of copper wires goes directly to verizon, while with cable you're sharing the copper back to the CO. However the modern cable modem protocols allocate space in such a way that it's not the wire back to the CO that causes delays anymore (this was certainly the case with early cable modems) and each cable modem connected has reserved bandwidth. DSL is rock solid in the slope since most people just bundle their cable modem with their cable tv (this is even more common now since a lot of us don't have land lines at all). In manhattan however, esp. at businesses there are lots of DSL slowdowns, inauguration day was a great example since so many people were trying to stream the inauguration response times and bandwidth dropped considerably at our office.

Anyway hulu and other high bandwidth demands have drastically increased the bandwidth that most people use in a very quick time, so it's not at all surprising that cable companies have been caught off guard and are maxing out their backbones.