Warning to all Optimum Online Users....

slinga

Established Member
Hey what's up?

This is a warning to everyone who uses Optimum Online (Cablevision) broadband. I just found out a few days ago I was capped at 20k a second upload speeds. I've been using Opt Online for 4+ years and it's disgusting that they'd cap me without even warning me. Especially considering when I first got it, it was $30 a month for 10 mbit upload and 10 mbit dowlnoad. Now I was paying $50 for 20k uploads.

Anyway I called them up, I was real civil with them, and they removed the caps. There were assholes on the phone though, insisting that I had peer-to-peer file sharing programs, which I don't.
 
The UK's NTL Broadband service (1MB speed) is caped too ya know!

People may only download 1GB perday, then you get sent down to 56k (BAHH!)

A real P.I.T.A, i'm sure!
 
I hope all providers don't end up like this....it'll be a sad day
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They cap you if you're using any type of P2P software?
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Hope my cable ISP doesn't do this to me...they've been pretty good to me though. They recently instituted a bit cap of 30gb month/2gb a day but it seems pretty much uninforced...at least in my area.
 
Hmm, well I thought they did give us an e mail warning about it. A friend of mine got capped and from what I hear they were cool over the phone and uncapped him...They run a pretty damn good service compared to most and I guess they want to crack down on people who take 'advantage' of it. Better than capping everyone.
 
10mb up and down would be awesome for that price. I pay $100/m for 3.5mb down and 384kb up from comcast. So even if they did up the price a little thats still one really good deal.
 
Please tell me you're not serious Ice. You're paying almost 3.5 times as much as I am for access and I have unlimited down (well in the sense that it goes as fast as everything will let it go). My upload caps off at about 40KB/s.
 
Yep, I'm serious. All we have available in my area is cable and the first plan is $60/m for 2mb down and 128kb up and I have the second plan. DSL will probably never be available or not for a long time. I split the bill with 3 other people though so its not too bad.
 
I have Adelphia cable, I've got teh connection suckiness. Actually my downstream is good, no cap, so I can get 2-4 mbits/sec. My upstream is capped at frickin 128 kbits, thats 16 KBytes/sec. MAXIMUM. I usually get more like 100 kbits up. Plus my latency is pretty poor and the service is unreliable. However, its that or dialup. Or satellite, but as a gamer that doesn't even count as an option, as the latency is crippling. All for 45 bucks a month.

Anyway, it wouldn't be a problem, but when I use sharing software I lose all my downstream speed. When my upload gets taxed, my download speed shoots to almost as low as upstream.
 
so about this crackdown on p2p programs, my friend's Comcast (formerly AT&T) cable internet service was shut down, he called customer service and they said he was using Kazaa. He uses Kazaa and edonkey2k often, so maybe someone noticed the amount of bandwidth he used. Has this happened to anyone else lately?
 
Here's what happens a lot. The Music companies and software companies business associations, such as BSA, IDSA, etc. will get on KaZaa and other open p2p networks and search for software/movies/games that the companies they represent own the copyrights to. Once they find them, they find the IP(s) of the person sharing the files and do a lookup with ARIN to see what company owns the IP that that use is on. The contact that company, usually an ISP, and tell them that if they do not take all means to stop this user from sharing copyrighted material, there will be legal action taken against the ISP as well as the person sharing the files. The proccess is quite automated to a certain extent and I'm sure they are constantly scanning.

The ISP does have a certain responsibility for that its user is doing, and to avoid any trouble, will contact the user, slow down the user, or cut the user's access completely. This happens quite often at the ISP I work for.

Some larger ISP's will take it a step further and do scans of its customer's IPs for common file-sharing ports to catch them before the larger firms find them.

So anyway, if you're still using a p2p client, make sure you are changing settings/ports to non-standard items, and not sharing things that will get you in trouble, such as copyrighted new movies and software.
 
Gee by the sounds of most isp's outside of Australia, i can honestly say that we Australians truly have the shittest cable plans around. Check these links for some f#cked cable plans.

Rip Off

And here's the company that has been ripping people off ever since cable was available here.
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King of all rippoffs
 
What worries me is not the caps, but the fact that everything is done without you knowing. Who knows how long I've been capped at 20k? It's the same as stealing. I'm paying $50 a month thinking I'm getting 128k uploads, only I'm not, and it's because of my damn ISP says I'm using too much bandwidth. What constitutes too much bandwidth??? I asked on the phone and the guy kept jumping around the issue. He wouldn't say "Uploading at x kb for y hours is excessive", all he would say was don't upload too much.

I know optimum online is still the best internet service available on Long Island, NY, but can anybody recommend some alternatives? They have a monopoly and their abusing it.
 
Originally posted by schi0249@May 31, 2003 @ 09:46 PM

The only cap on RR basic service is your upload speed tops off at 386 kbps.

Eh? I can only get 250k/sec for download with my RR connection. Bastards capped it years ago without telling anyone and have been getting shit for it ever since. It wasn't so much that they capped it, but that they did it without telling us and without giving us some kind of credit. Cutting back service while keeping the same price is effectively just rasing the price. I'm not sure if DSL is in my area yet. I think it might be (else I've just been getting offers in the mail for no reason). In whole I'm happy with how RR works, but I'm still quite bitter about this issue.
 
Confirmed. I love my RR service, and twice I've had some BLAZINGLY fast downloads from web pages. One went at 700KB/sec, the other at one megabyte per second. Woohoo
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But even regularly I get in the 200KB-400KB range, no download caps there. I also upload at 50-60KB/sec through DC++, but I also stay the hell away from Kazaa & Co. (nothing but viruses, and I hate IE/WMP integration)
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Oh, and all this is on a slow AMD K6-3 computer with Win98SE and cable modem via USB adapter.

Quadriflax, you might wanna check into http://www.dslreports.org - they have some nifty registry tweaks to increase TCP/IP throughput in all versions of Windows.
 
Originally posted by Taelon@Jun 2, 2003 @ 09:15 PM

Oh, and all this is on a slow AMD K6-3 computer with Win98SE and cable modem via USB adapter.


Ew... I've always found that to be flakey as hell and unstable. Dont you?
 
Where do you live? With RR, during non-peck times I get as high as 2 mbps.

Rochester, NY. They started off with uncapped speeds. Highest I ever saw was 900+k/sec. But then a ton of people signed up and instead of upgrading and adding more servers, lines, etc, they just capped us all at 250k. They blamed the fact that they switched from Motorola modems to new Toshiba DOCSIS modems. They said that the Motorolas were faster and to even things out with the DOCSIS people they capped us. Or that's how I understand it anyway.

Quadriflax, you might wanna check into http://www.dslreports.org - they have some nifty registry tweaks to increase TCP/IP throughput in all versions of Windows.

Oh, no need now. I used a registry tweak a long time ago and that's how I was able to push as high as 900k/sec. But I regularly hit the hard 250k/sec limit now. No tweak will get around that. And even if there is a way to circumvent it, they'd know in a heartbeat and shut me off. I was more concerned about the incomplete newsgroup postings and packet loss during peak hours. But those problems seem to have subsided..for now. This is why monopolies are a bad thing people.
 
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