Cablevision/Optimum Internet DOWN 8 days SO FAR THIS MONTH

Actually, I think this board has consistently reached consensus Cablevision just sucks no matter where you live.

Which I think is very telling, because (in my experience) the members of this board agree so rarely, and on so little. Below, I present biased anecdotal evidence which (in my mind) confirm the hypothesis I set out to prove: I searched the terms "cablevision sucks".

As expected, the terms returned pages and pages of results, all of which say similar things: Cablevision sucks.

Yes, the message is united no matter where a poster has posted from. The message does not seem to vary based on neighborhood, or income, or racial demographics.

Leading me to believe:

-If Cablevision served East New York, they would do it in a manner that sucked.

-If cablevision served the Upper East Side, they would do it in a manner that sucked.

-If Cablevision served an area that had an income and racial distribution that somehow EXACTLY MATCHED the results of the New York City census, they would do it in a manner that sucked.

http://brooklynian.com/forum/search-results.php?cx=partner-pub-1040068503971974:3di5qsnhyev&cof=FORID:10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=+cablevision+suck&sa= SEARCH »&siteurl=brooklynian.com%2Fforum%2Fcrown-heights-and-prospect-lefferts-gardens%2Fcablevisionoptimum-internet-down-8-days-so-far-this-month-1%23post-731553

...but, of course, maybe people just don't post about cablevision service when it is reliably working.

This has been discussed ad nauseum on these boards, and I've probably been one of the biggest contributors (at one point, I registered a domain name [optoffline.com] and requested that frustrated users document the ups and downs of their bandwidth. Despite a lot of complaining, there was virtually no participation). In any event, what I was able to discern was that "normal" (non-Boost customers) were being served on very overloaded servers and that the brown-outs (and black-outs) mirrored the predictable pattern of peak usage times, the worst being the evening when most people get home from work and settle in for the evening.

As far as speculation on whether or not Cablevision puts as much of a priority on the service provided to low- and middle-income 'hoods - I don't know. What I do know is that they certainly treat their higher paying customers better. Because I needed to host a server at home, I switched over to the Boost plan. I noticed instant (not overnight - instant) gains in UL/DL speeds and, more importantly, I haven't had a single outage in... well, more than a year.

My office is on St. Johns and Troy and I have had no problems with phone or internet from Cablevision. Of course, now that I said that things will probably turn to crap.

Business....when I have a problem they show up pretty quickly. But even still, there have been no outages at all... yet.

Giving better service to INDIVIDUALS and BUSINESSES because they pay more for a premium package sounds completely fair to me. When one thinks about it, we have an entire economic system that strives to implement this sense of fairness.

As a result, I continue to believe the hypothesis I set out to prove: All neighborhoods receive equally crappy service from Cablevision.

I also agree with the OP: Some competition would do this industry a world of good.

(If requested, I will cite instances in which competition has improved customer service, yet leave out instances in which it has no effect.)

Given my research methods, I will always prove myself to be correct. I would make an excellent researcher.

Verizon is not available in large parts of Crown Heights. Not even DSL is available where I live.

That said, I have Cablevision Ultra, and off-peak it is hands down the fastest internet service available in the USA, twice as fast as the fastest FIOS offering. I get close to 85mbps throughput downstream.

Uptime is reasonable. I haven't had any substantial outages in over a year and a half.

The cable monopolies are a cruel joke on us all.