OptimumOnline sucks too
While I’m in a mood this morning I might as well voice my immediate impressions on my new cable services.
Where I live, the company is Cablevision and I recently switched from AT&T to Cablevision’s promotional Triple Play offer of $99 plus taxes, fees and other charges for internet, telephone and television.
The television part of this completely sucks! Finding a decent show to watch is damn near impossible. There is a super-long list in the guide, which takes several clicks of the remote to access, passing a page with advertisements on it. Instead of highlighting or filtering the channels that have access to, I see all the channels on cable, 9 times out of 10 I select a channel that I don’t receive and I’m left scrolling from 1-700 or just settling on anything to watch other than the guide.
The quality of the TV is absolutely atrocious. I get digital distortion on the best of the HD channels. Some shows on popular channels can’t even be viewed clearly. My Optimum Online service is like watching small mpegs on a giant screen TV. Streaming Netflix is superior to my television service.
Why so many advertisements for a pay service? There are ads on the TV guide, ads on all the shows…and…. on to the internet service:
The reason I’m writing this right now is because of the search.domainnotfound.optimum.net redirect. This is an underhanded low-life redirect to optimum’s affiliate relationships, forcing anyone who leaves the TLD off when typing in a domain name to suffer an unwanted page of affiliate links, which btw can be unrelated to the domain name entered.
At least with AT&T’s DSL if I type in “google” it goes to “http://google.com” and not to “http://search.domainnotfound.optimum.net/cablevassistsearch_keyword/ws/results/Dns/google/…”
The only problem with the phone is that instead of being a separate cable to the pole outside my house, my telephone signal travels on the shared coax. Now my phone is not only dependent on the cable company fixing their equipment when a storm comes knocking down trees but also the internet and cable modem. That’s a lot of dependence on new technology that is proving to be full of issues.
I’m going to drop the TV service because I can’t stand paying for so many advertisements when the quality of picture is so poor with distortion.