Apparently Suddenlink access was down in Eureka and Arcata for a large part of the day yesterday. Fortunately for us we have DSL at the office. By the time we got home, where we have Suddenlink (mainly because DSL has not been available at our location) was back up.
When the sale of the local franchise by Cox to Cebridge (that has been re-branded as Suddenlink – OK, OK, stop with the commercials!) was announced, we had been told how much better things would be. Humboldt County, while a tiny drop in the Cox ocean, would become a relatively large market in Suddenlink’s system. But with a horribly handled email transition from Cox, erratic email service in general, poor technical support, the odd file upload problem and now this, things appear quite different. Did the company grow too fast by absorbing Humboldt County and other regions? Were they just not that good a company to begin with? Hard to say, now. I only hope they manage to get their act together soon. As we have all learned by the recent fiber outages, Internet access has become indispensable and must be reliable.
I did promise some aide by side tests of DSL and Suddenlink. For what it was worth I ran an bunch of speed tests side by side between Suddenlink and DSL from the same computer over a three day period. Average downlink speed for Suddenlink was 4.1 mbps, and up was 470 kbs. With DSL it was 4.9 mbps down, and 615 kbs up. DSL is the clear winner in performance, and I have not yet improved my wiring which may make it even better. FTP appears to work much better as well, possibly partially from the much improved uplink speed. I am dropping Suddenlink because I want all the performance I can get get, particularly FTP uploads. At this point they are fairly comparable both in performance and price, so it might not be worth it to the average user to go to all the trouble to switch.
I activated ATT DSL today. Even though I purchased “Elite” service it is not running anywhere near the advertised top speed of 6.0 mbps. In fact it is running slightly slower than Suddenlink (3.934 vs 4.185). Upload is quite a bit faster (623 kbps vs 486) however. Not quite what I hoped for. I will have to check my phone wires and make sure all connections are good and tight but at this point it looks comparable. I guess it was simply too much to hope for to get 6.0. Oh well.
I was having trouble with Suddenlink with my outgoing mail. I could not get resolution. I finally received the following message. I don’t know if it works because I have not yet tested it but for me it is not going to matter because I have given up on Suddenlink and am switching to DSL.
————- message from Suddenlink ————
If a customer is using a third party email address, one that is NOT @suddenlink.net, @cox.net, or @cox-internet.com, they must use mail.tyler.net for the outgoing mail server. This server does NOT require authentication.
You can get 4 different levels of home service from ATT for DSL. Fastest is 6.0 mbs down. Costs less than Suddenlink and is 25% faster.
Yeah, I get 4.5m down and 480k up pretty consistently with SuddenLink through the speed test. Just wondering what DSL gets.
There’s a speedtest at:
http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
We currently have Suddenlink, but the dependability of DSL is appealing, even if it’s a bit slower.
How is the AT&T DSL? I can get the 1.5 to 3.0 Mbps service. Is that as good of throughput as I get with Cable?
It is frustrating. Cox was almost never down. But, to be fair, two of the recent outages weren’t Suddenlink’s fault, the cable was down. For the others, I expected some transition problems, the trouble is that their tech support isn’t well informed on what is going on, so they put you through all the hoops, shut this off, unplug this, now plug it back in, when they don’t need to. All they needed to say was, we are moving some things around and you will be down for a few hours. OK. Fine. I can deal with it. They should allocate about 1/3 of that bloated ad budget to ads informing us what to expect, that it will be brief, and they will work to make sure it is as brief as possible. They wouldn’t lose us. We’d understand. As it is, I am sick of the Suddenlink jingle and ads, and the joke here is “Suddenlink we’re disconnected.”
I will say their tech support guys are nice, but if you have a Mac, ask right away for a level 2 tech and someone who knows Macs.
Prior to the Cebridge-Suddenlink takeover, comments about Cebridge on DSL Reports (http://www.dslreports.com/) were generally negative. Although their phone & local office support has been OK (IMO), their reliability has been considerably worse. Now’s the time for the local bureaucrats who negotiated their contract to do something… or not.
Is there a way to force these companies to have a local contact phone?
Is there any local DNS servers, in case of a fiber outage?