Tag Archives: download speeds

Mid-Hudson Internet Service Turns for the Worse – Much Worse

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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:

IP_ADDRESS

TEST_DATE

DOWNLOAD_MB/s

UPLOAD_MB/s

LATENCY_MS

SERVER_NAME

DISTANCE_MILES

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 1:15 PM

8.41

0.17

278

Clifton, NJ

100

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 1:17 PM

9.66

0.03

1744

Boston, MA

150

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 1:19 PM

8.09

0.07

2119

New York, NY

100

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 1:21 PM

6.78

0.05

910

Seattle, WA

2350

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 3:49 PM

9.43

0.05

1519

Granby, MA

50

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 3:51 PM

9.52

0.03

1639

Clifton, NJ

100

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 3:53 PM

8.18

0.08

2181

Seattle, WA

2350

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 3:54 PM

9.45

0.17

22

New York, NY

100

24.105.233.232

Mar 30, 2010 3:55 PM

9.49

0.04

1007

Washington, DC

300

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.

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A Pleasant Corrective to Mid-Hudson Cablevision’s Reputation Here

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Some new technicians from Mid-Hudson Cablevision arrived this afternoon and performed further testing on the lines and boxes outside of the house. Not quite sure what they did, or did not, do, but, happily, the results of their ministrations are entirely positive.

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.

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Mid-Hudson Cablevision – a monopoly on bad internet service in Hudson and beyond

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Back in September I wrote my first complaint here about our internet service from Mid-Hudson Cablevision (MHC).1 The situation with our internet service has only gotten worse. I wrote a letter to the President of MHC in December. This elicited a call from a higher level technician who told me that he had looked at my account and “made some changes” that should improve the service level. Since then, I have had times where I quite literally counted “1 Mississippi 2 Mississippi” between the click of the mouse and any response from the target server.

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 [↩]
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Mid-Hudson Cablevision Inc. – false advertising?? or just plain bad service?? or both??

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We get out internet service via Mid-Hudson Cablevision, Inc. (Catskill, NY based) along with TV services. After only a month I began to notice that the internet service seemed slow compared to the service we had in Cambridge. In mid-August I searched around for a speed testing service. I settled on Speedtest.net because they offered a wide range of test-partners scattered around the world and a rolling data presentation page that makes it easy to keep track of all the tests performed.

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.

2009-09-26_1404

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