"Does anyone else have service interuptions with Optimum Online Service?"?

Question

I've had optimum online for over a year and have found the service to be awful. At least once in every time that I'm surfing I've been disconnected from the internet and then have to reconnect. At first it wasn't so bad and I toughed my way through it but in the last four months this has been ridiculous. Is this a common problem for other Optimum Customers or am I just lucky?

Answer 1

As much of a pain as it is, call them every time and open a trouble ticket. If and when it's all over, you will have lots of calls/notes on your account and they will make it up to you with a free month of service (if you demand it and maybe threaten to go with DSL instead.) I had Optimum Online for about 3 years and loved it, problems were rare. There are a few things that could be messing you up. First, call them and ask that a technician come to your home and measure the signal levels, both at the street and in your home.

One time I had to have the line from the telephone pole replaced because squirrels chewed through the coax outer insulation. Also, when the line comes into your house, the first thing it should hit is a 1GHz 2-way splitter, with one leg going to your cable modem and the other leg going to another splitter that fans out to all your TVs. This gives the strongest possible signal to your cable modem. They should also replace the cable modem itself just in case. It's also possible there's an issue further out in your neighborhood, are your neighbors having similar trouble? If it's been getting worse over the last few months, it could be something mechanical like corrosion in a wire or piece of equipment out in the neighborhood somewhere. It's also possible your city/neighborhood has been suffering through an extensive network upgrade that has caused several outages... they could tell you if this is the case as well.

Answer 2

While I am glad I found this discussion to know I can stop trying to fix it myself, I am livid that Optimum Online doesn't have a post on their home page or some other official message on this. I use 2 accounts with them, and while 1 still works, the other stopped working at about 7PM last night. I have probably spent close to 2 hours trying to fix it, assuming it must be my problem since the 1 account still works. Of course the dead account happens to be the one where I am expecting important emails like hotel reservation confirmations and a receipt for a big online purchase. I am not expecting to ever receive either note after a test I did last night... I sent my failed Optonline account an email from another domain, and this morning the sending email address had a failure message. Mail is apparently not being queued for delivery when this is fixed - it is being rejected!