Newwave News
It seems as if my little post about the status of Newwave’s internet service in Madisonville, Newwave Internet Still Sux!, has stirred up the pot a bit. After the post being online over a month, I received a comment on my post from a gentlemen who works for Newwave wanting to know if I was still having problems.
My response via email:
Ever since Newwave bought out Charter in our area we’ve had numerous problems. Constantly dropping connections, extremely slow bandwidth, etc.
A few months ago we were told we had 6 meg service, but were not seeing anything faster than 1.5 meg rates when doing speed tests. Most of the time the speed tests were in the neighborhood of 350k-750k, and as a gamer who’s paying for 3m, this simply wasn’t acceptable. Since Newwave acquired a new connection from Sprint in the area (OC12 I believe) the speed tests have been average of 2.5m, but still never above 3m, and nowhere near 6m that we’re supposed to be getting.
As it stands, I can game fairly well with this speed and am content for now. At least I’m getting something in the neighborhood of what I’m actually paying for, but it disturbs me that for some reason Newwave still can’t seem to figure out the problem and get it fixed completely.
Thank you for taking the time to post a comment and for getting in touch with me. I do appreciate the fact that Newwave is interested in solving the problem and taking an initiative to contact the customer.
Feel free to contact me any time.
Well… today I received a call out of the blue from Mr. Whitehead inquiring about the status of the my internet connection since his post the other evening. Apparently, someone had been working hard to get things straightened out over the past few days as speeds have jumped dramatically.
We’ve been seeing a number of commercials saying that the new 6Meg service is up and running in Madisonville, but none of the speed tests I’ve run have been anywhere close. Today, the speed tests were between 3.5Meg and 5.5Meg on average. There are still issues during the evening though. For example, right now I’m getting 2.0Meg on my speed test (17:02 CDT 01/23/07). I’m sure a bit of this can be attributed to the fact that evening hours see more internet usage from kids and adults gaming and surfing the internet from their homes. Naturally, the more people trying to get information from the net, the slower the connections become. However, a 4M drop from what we’re said to be getting is a bit much.
It is my intention to keep you updated on this subject as much as possible. While I am extremely pleased about the progress so far, I still have some reservations about the service I’m receiving. I still feel much better with the service of cable internet than with DSL, but until I start receiving fairly consistent speeds above the 5Meg range I’ll still have some issues. I do applaud Newwave for their continued effort to provide the best service for their customers.
In addition, I must add that at no point in time did I approach Newwave regarding the post on Corridor9. Someone from the company approached me about it. I guess this just goes to show that even the “little man” can make a difference if he’s persistent enough, or maybe it was just luck.
