Leaving all of this web daring do aside, the restaurant remains a welcome addition to Hudson. It brings more life to the street. Soon, I will go for a meal. Swoon, next door continues to live up to its status as a legend. I hope that American Glory BBQ will turn out to be a legend too.

With teeth clenched I called the service line at Mid-Hudson and was connected with a technician. I described the problem and he fiddled some dials on his end.

“How many computers are hooked up to your network now!” Well, at the moment two plus our Vonage VOIP telephone box. He asked me to turn off one of the computers. I ran to Karen’s computer and turned it off. With the technician still on the line he called out the ping speed as the computer went offline. Back down to 30 to 40 milliseconds (from between 1500 to 2250 milliseconds, a crippling ping speed). Quite good.

He claimed that there must be something amiss on that computer. Since then, we have not had a new bout of slow ping rates. I am waiting. Meanwhile I am also making inquiries among my more tech savvy to find out if it makes any sense that a computer on the internal network in the house could cause such terrible ping problems??

At any rate, this time Mid-Hudson came through with some useful service.

Just when I was getting used to a fairly responsive internet service from Mid-Hudson Cablevision, this morning’s chase after emails brought me back to “1 Mississippi 2 Mississippi”. So I have run a few test via SpeedTest.net.

Here are the results:

M-H has definitely optimized for Download Speeds, BUT the latency (this is the old “1 Mississippi 2 Mississippi” count after a mouse click) has gone from 50 to 60 to the horrible waits shown here. Finally, the upload speeds are anemic. They should be 0.4 to 0.5 MB/s.

The internet connections are now responsive, even snappy.The latency numbers for links to NYC, Boston, or Washington are now under 30 milliseconds. Even links to San Francisco and Seattle are under 100 milliseconds. Uploads are now a presentable 400 to 500 KB/sec. Some download speeds are well over the advertised rates of 5 MB/sec.

The Vonage telephone line no longer sounds like a fuzzy version of a bad horror movie echo chamber. I conducted a 30 minute conversation without any dropouts or auditory boomerangs.

Lets hope that Mid-Hudson can maintain this service level.

So, I dug into the situation and continued to gather data and more information about what constitutes good internet service. Turns out that download speed is only a part of the story. In my case the “latency” – that’s the response time to get a target server to respond to a request for a page or other information – is also critical. In addition, latency has great effects on services like Skype.

The upshot is that the  latency (ping) for service at my house over the last month has been running nearly 2,000 milliseconds, and, for the entire period I have been testing since August 2009, the latency averages 568 milliseconds.²  As MHC’s own technicians have said, and is widely cited in discussions about latency on cable internet systems, latency should be below 100 milliseconds and excellent is 25 milliseconds.

To add to the insults the advertised download speeds of 5 MB/s are still a distant dream and recently the upload speeds, typically 10% or so of the download speeds, have barely gotten over 0.05 MB/s.

MHC amazingly has now begun to offer:

“DOUBLE YOUR SPEED for only $ 5.00 more per month (up to 10 MB*)”

“TRIPLE YOUR SPEED for only $ 10.00 more per month (up to 15 MB*)”

PT Barnum would love these offers.

So, where does this leave me. Given the monopoly status of MHC, I am not holding out much hope for some miraculous cure. Internet service is a cash cow for cable companies. It operates over the same infrastructure as their TV services so it only requires the head end equipment necessary to connect to a trunk and manage the distribution of services. MHC has taken a futher step to insure the cash cow. They only offer internet service bundled with a cable TV service. Some deal!

i am now searching around in the state county and local governments for some agency and/or some politician interested in this issue. I am sure that I will return to this topic soon.

1. a hint about how sloppy MHC is can be seen at the top of every page on their website, No Page Titles. Not even a rooky web developer at the local community college would be so sloppy
2. This is based on more 250 tests

The winning team found all of the balloons in 6 hours 52 minutes. The team used a cascade of financial incentives; they shared the $40,000 prize among those who helped find the balloons. To drive the social network, those who referred those who found a balloon received part of the winnings. Listen to Riley Crane on Colbert Nation and look at the team’s website for more about how it worked.

I think that we need to seize on this social invention to solve some pressing matters in our recent history. For instance, why not use this technology to find, for example:

• evidence of crimes or egregious unethical behavior committed by Dick Cheney
• managers of sub-prime mortgage companies who intentionally targeted people who could not financially support home ownership, those who created low-doc and no-doc mortgages.
• members of the defense and spy establishment who knowingly foisted the WMD strategy on the world to support Bush’s craziness
• what happened to the $billions in cash disbursed in Iraq during the early years of the Bush War?

How would this work? Well, some ideas will lead directly to real money, others will require some wealthy folks with interest in the question to put up some short change to invent the discoveries. Then, we just sit back and watch the social web work.

There is a problem here, that is fairly obvious and not without some risks. The same social discovery process can be used by anyone with a little cash and access to the web. We will see a tsunami of questions from a less desirable portion of the world.

Later…….. poor kid.

I have had repeated emails with Craig (last name withheld at his request) at Mid-Hudson. In his first response, he wrote, “The service is burstable to 4.8 mbps, but sustained is usually between 2.5mbps and 3.5mbps.” I pointed out to him that Mid-Hudson Cablevision widely advertises and states that their high speed internet services are “Downstream is 5 Meg” or as Craig has stated it “5 mbps”. In a further email response, Craig stated that; “The 2.5-3mbps is the sustained service for the 5mbps plan, I am not sure why they don’t say that the 5mb service is “up to” 5mbps.

After I submitted further data showing that the downstream or download speeds of the high speed internet service was 0.91 Mb/s on 9/22/9, I received a visit by a Mid-Hudson Cablevision technician, Jason, who performed tests on the cable modem and our internal router/wifi system. Our internal systems are not part of the problem. Jason replaced the cable modem and confirmed that speeds in the 3.5 to 4 Mb/s were the typical performance of the internet service.

So, here we are with a company that advertises services at 5 Mb/s but has never delivered them. Further, no one has suggested that they will.

Just to put all of this in context, Speed Matters finds that for NY state the average download speed is 8.4 Mb/s. This means that if Mid-Hudson Cablevision would just meet their advertised speeds the would still be 40% slower than the state average. We are not exactly setting a high bar here.

So, now I await the next actions from Mid-Hudson Cablevision to bring their services into line with both their advertised service levels and

Here is some data to substantiate my claims. You will notice that on the best days, the service levels never reach the advertised 5 Mbps.

Download the whole spreadsheet – MHCable-speedtests-2009-09-28

Click on the image to get a full-size readable version.