Attention Cablevision: Stop spamming me. PERMANENTLY.
At home, I have Cablevision’s Optonline, the over-priced broadband in my area. I am too far from a switching station to get DSL, so they are my only fat pipe option — for now.
I agreed to the price, which has ticked up to $50 a month for what is at best, fair-to-mediocre speeds. Not awful, but nothing to write home about.
I can live with that — at least until my node is wired with Verizon FIOS.
But my biggest complaint about Cablevision Optonline is that they are god-damned spammers. I have opted out of their junk email a dozen times. Its good for about 3-6 months, then the spam starts again. I made money buying CVC back in 2002 — it was under $10 — but jeez, I couldn’t own this piece-o-crap again (I have no objectivity any longer).
Hey Verizon! Would you please light up my neighborhood so I can lose these stinking spammers?
Thank you.
You are one spasmodic motor trucker.
where do you think you live, Denmark?
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2007/tc20070424_190579.htm
Just shut off my Time Warner cable modem today replaced by Verizon. I had a few thugs come to my house from Time Warner and say there were there to “check your modem”. They came into my house, saw I had wireless that they hadn’t sold me and then told me that was “illegal”. They then tried to enter my tenant’s apartment in the basement. We had not called for service. Apparently Time Warner thinks they can enter your house at will. I ended up speaking with their supervisor and offering to let him speak to my lawyers. I said I understood that he had a piece of crap business model but that fighting wireless probably wasn’t a good long term strategy (they were saying I was stealing by letting my tenant use the wireless despite their contract saying I could have up to 4 computers on the system and I only had 3). Anyway, I enjoy watching the music industry die its stupid death and I will enjoy the old cable monopolies suffering as well. I guess betting the future on suing your customers and thinking Britney was a long term strategy weren’t the best ideas.
I too am waiting for Verizon high speed in my neighborhood (I have DSL)- the key to getting Verizon high speed faster is to tell Shelly Silver,Joe Bruno, and Gov. Spitzer to give Verizon statewide access
to T.V. so they do not have to go to every town, and village to get T.V. approval!
BR,
It isn’t spam because you have “a business relationship.” Welcome to the brave new world.
The price creep for anything over wires is obscene.
Comcast here…~$65/month 4 meg down and 384k up..when it works…nothing else here but Qwest and that’s much slower…
rt
I’m near a main TWC service center and I get ~3MBps during peak hours and 6MBps most other times (see: http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/). But I’ve had a number of problems with VPN through their service due to severe numbers of dropped packets. This is because the extra info stuffed in each packet over VPN exceeds their routers’ capabilities. If others have this problem you should configure your router to use an MTU of 1430 instead of 1500, which gives your packets a little extra room to carry VPN header info.
“What do Internet users in Denmark, Holland, Iceland, Canada, and France have in common? They’re more likely to be sending e-mail and surfing the Web over a high-speed link than just about anyone else in the world—including their counterparts in the U.S.
That’s a key finding of an Apr. 23 study by an economic research group that ranks the U.S. No. 15 out of 30 countries in per-capita broadband subscriptions. And it’s adding fuel to a debate about how far the U.S. should go to usher a wider swath of the population into the Digital Age. Those were among the topics slated for discussion at an Apr. 24 Senate committee hearing on broadband and American competitiveness.”
Per capita seems to me to be the wrong metric here; per household seems more apt.
re: the above comments about US internet stone age….
granted as the US is so vast broadband penetration as a nation won’t ever reach european/asian levels, but c’mon it’s 2007…..it’s inexcusable for such pathetic broadband services available in the major/dense/affluent metro areas NY, LA, Chi, DC, SF.
Read all of the promises that the telco made prior to the 96 Telecom Act and compare to the true state of the information superhighway today. Talk about irony.
I use Cablevision Optimum Online and their internet speed is the fastest on Eastern Long Island.
Verizon DSL is not even close to Optimum Online cable speeds.
You can test your speed using:
http://www.speedtest.net
I get 10,112 kb/s download speed and 2,314 kb/s upload speed
I do not get any spam emails from them because I do not use their email service. I use a third party email.
I only get occasional (once every 2-3 months) phone calls from them offering me to buy their additional services.
The Register has an article that provides more color to your Cablevision problems.
They reportedly don’t take action when they are notified of compromised computers on their network leaving the bots operating and exposing their customers.
JKB,
A “keylogger” is a spyware that absolutely has nothing to do with your ISP. You can get it by simply opening an email attachment.
I would recommend running a spyware detection software on your computer.
The good and free ones are Spybot Search and Ad-Aware
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,22262-page,1/description.html
http://www.download.com/3000-2144-10045910.html
In addition, there is a very good and free antivirus, P2P shield, which protects internet email and outlook email – Avast. It is ranked the best in virus detection (better than all commercially available antivirus software) and it protects you from getting a virus/spyware from emails.
Check it out http://avast.com/
Barry,
In Colorado, unemployment insurance is next to impossible to claim based on the state’s love of employers. Curious what effect denied claims have on the number.
I use temporary e-mail addresses from SpamGourmet.com for all my non-personal contacts. It is pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.
I would update my e-mail on file at CableVision to a SpamGourmet.com temporary e-mail.
~~~
BR: I cant — they are my ISP — they KNOW my email address
You do not want Verizon FIOS. Google ’em and you’ll find they do two things that are nasty:
1. The router they provide is designed to throttle your connection if you go beyond the basics of email or web surfing. Like to download music or movies (or Linux distros even)? They will slow you down or cut you off.
2. They are known to eliminate your phone line in the process of installing FIOS. Ever get tired of their service in the future? Too bad. You’re stuck with them for now. No phone lines for you!
johntron wrote:
“granted as the US is so vast broadband penetration as a nation won’t ever reach european/asian levels”
The continental US territory is half the one of Canada. Plus, Canada’s population is a 10th of the USA. Strangely enough, Canada has a much higher penetration rate of high-speed internet access than the US.
As an example, my in-laws live in the Gaspé area, northeast of Quebec province, where the biggest city (Quebec City) is 350 miles away. It’s a rugged landscape, where winters are brutal,distances are a fact of life, and the customer’s density rather on the low side thank you very much.
Yet, they’ve had cable internet for over 8 years now. Price? 43$/month, email included.
Speed? 1.2 Mb upload, 655 Kbs download on average.
How come?
Elementary my dear Watson! The Federal government stroke a deal with the telcos: “If you want the densely populated cities, you provide for the rural areas too. In return, the territory you cover is yours. And BTW, remember that the monopoly you are granted can be, er, shall we say, re-examined if we receive too much negative feedback from your customers. Now, go forth and prosper!”
Last time I checked, they did just that.
And what about here in the US?
The embarrassing truth is that the policies enacted by the jerks in DC have injected the worse aspects of their “philosophy” about the all-around supremacy of a “free-market approach” to the telecom business, while leaving the correct ones out. And of course, any idea of the federal government mandating anything sensible (the tax fleecing they did mandate tough!) was out of the question. The result is the mess we’re in now.
I will spare the audience, the obvious aggravating factor of the “voluntary self-regulation” set of beliefs so dear to the heart of the current Administration. No agency has been left with real power to enforce good behavior from the telcos, or anyone remotely corporate anyway.
As for us, the suckers (a.k.a. customers)…
Francois
“The continental US territory is half the one of Canada. Plus, Canada’s population is a 10th of the USA. Strangely enough, Canada has a much higher penetration rate of high-speed internet access than the US.”
I think Canadians generally avoid the frozen wastelands of the north north and stay huddled closer to the border, whereas you can throw a rock and find a decently-sized town in this country.
That said, I agree, I mean, the government dropped the ball here to give the powerful cable operators more power. Who would’ve guessed?
By the way, I have FIOS. I’d say it is marginally superior to Cablevision, but it’s hardly a be all end all. Pretty much all broadband service in this country is mediocre, though I haven’t gotten spam… yet.
omcast is fast good, BUT the price crrep each month is S T every month it goes up around five dollars as if they are sitting in a room dreaming up ways to creep the price up and up and up
Interesting comments about DSL. However, T1 internet access is the future of broadband communications.