[RTC List] Suddenlink

[Josh Koenig]

> The question that follows is  why they are still signing up new  
> customers while existing customers are not getting the service  
> (bandwidth) that they were promised?

Well, it's not exactly a revelation that oversubscription is their  
business model. The same is true of virtually every known ISP (not to  
mention cellphone providers and innumerable other service-provision  
companies) in the land. For what it's worth, you aren't actually  
promised any internet bandwidth per-se, just a certain theoretical top  
speed to the next hop on the network. This is why a T-1 costs "so  
much" for "so little" bandwidth. Because you actually get a Service  
Level Agreement to back it up.

As someone who doesn't have DSL as an option out in the remote reaches  
of Trinidad, I'm not happy about this at all, but it's not as though  
this wasn't a known issue w/the cable option. The same thing regularly  
occurs within individual neighborhoods where high usage among  
neighbors clogs out the local upstream link. The fact that they're  
claiming saturation county-wide is a bit unusual, but I wouldn't be  
surprised if it also had something to do with more of their pipe being  
used for higher-end cable services as well as increased internet  
traffic.

DSL is somewhat more reliable as you have a direct line to the CO,  
which is somewhat less likely to end up saturated than a local link  
further down the network food chain, but as long as we're bound by a  
single line out this achilles heel is always out there for the county.

-j