Optimum Online Broadband Subsidiary Cablevision Serves Long Island

Optimum Online is a broadband service provider. This subsidiary of Cablevision serves Long Island and other parts of New York, Bronx, Brooklyn, Westchester and parts of New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

The services of Optimum Online are available in three tiers, namely, Standard tier with 15 MBit/s download to 2 MBit/s upload which was made available from June 2006; the Boost tier with 30 MBit/s download to 5MBits upload and introduced in Fall of 2006 and the Ultra tier with 50 MBit/s for both download and upload. It is currently undergoing beta testing.

Cablevision, the owners of Optimum Online also own Lightpath, which provides the broadband service with fiber optic cables in the New York metro area. The company also enjoys a peering network with Points of Presence in Newark, New Jersey, New York City, Ashbum, Virginia, Los Angeles, California and Chicago.

Optimum Online has a capping policy for its subscribers. People have reported that after extensive upload usage they suddenly find the speed diminishing to 150 kbps from 1 mbps. The company has no information available for the capping policy available to the consumer. The company claims that this depends on the CPU usage of the gateway server and there are no fixed parameters for the capping process..

The Optimum Online customers through discussions concluded that any continuous usage of the bandwidth, say between 5 and 24 hours, could result in the capping of the bandwidth. It has been found that using Bit Torrent, FTP or any other server application is not possible without getting capped. The way out is set the maximum upload speed to 10 to 15 kbps and after using the Bit Torrent for seeding for a limited amount and then turning it off.

The capping facility eventually bars the Optimum Online customers from video conferencing or any such activities where large amount of data transfer is necessary at a high speed. But actually the customers pay for the speed without ever using it. This is as per a clause in the terms of agreement that gives power to the company to use whatever means to ensure the security and stability of the network.

Optimum Online has said that generally no customer is capped except for those using servers on the network. In case of capping the customer can only feel that he has been capped. The information can be only gathered by calling up the customer care service. This is called throttling and after four such occurrences the subscription is terminated. Optimum Online