 Review by whizkid3 
UPDATED: 168 days ago
member for 7.7 years, 2292 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Rego Park,Queens,NY
 $45 per month (12 month contract)
 about 6 days
 "Decent connection - 4774k/360k (5000/500 advertised) - No outages"
 "email set up (MS Outlook) was a pain; slowly increasing fee"
 "Good value for those in NYC that can't get OOL or FIOS"
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Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Earthlink Cable Internet Service is a bi-directional DOCSIS HFC (hybrid fiber-coax) system, piggy-backed on Time-Warner Cable. This service is available throughout NYC, Long Island, and other states. The Earthlink Cable service is available at locations where your cable provider is either Time Warner, Bright House Networks or Comcast. (They also provide dial-up and DSL.) Time Warner is the only cable service available in my neighborhood in Queens, New York. (In addition to Earthlink, there are other companies that you can order service that is piggy-backed onto Time Warner.) A few blocks away, Optimum Online is available. Because it is dependent on which company provides your cable service, there seems to be no overlap (you don't have a choice). You can check out reported speeds in this area on the following map:
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Getting Earthlink installed was a piece of cake. I don't have cable television (using DirecTV for my television service), however, there was a line going to my home. I signed up for a year, getting the first six months for $29.95 per month, after which it jumps to $41.95 per month. A contract is not necessary, but you will not get the $29.95 per month / six month discount. Earthlink bills me on a month-to-month basis, charging my credit card.
When I signed up for Earthlink service, the tech was here in six days. Unfortunately, he came earlier than scheduled. I was hoping to be here, instead my wife was around. I already had a cable drop into my office, which is the one that was used. The cable was in good conditon, so I had no problems with it. Normally, I request the drop be replaced. The tech set the connection up in about 12 minutes flat; and didn't even bother to clean up after himself, leaving empty wrappers on the floor. (At least, from the 12 minutes he took to set it up, he appeared to know what he was doing.) He provided an install disk, but didn't open the package nor stick the disk in any of my machines. Thank god for that. I would have needed to uninstall that crap. He didn't connect my firewall/router (ZyXel P334), or network, but rather connected the cable modem to the coax cable, and supplied the Cat5 network cable to one of our PCs. This was not the way I would have done it, and would have made sure the cable went through my firewall. Good thing my PC was running ZoneAlarm, as in the three hours between when it was connected and I came home from work, I had already gotten a number of 'hits' reported by ZoneAlarm. As the PC the tech connected was already configured for DHCP, he probably simply rebooted it, and the connection was up and running. I promply disconnected the PC, and put the firewall in place. I have the firewall set to clone the MAC address of the PC that was registered when the install took place.
One thing that irked me was even though I already had a Toshiba PCX1100U cable modem that I own, Earthlink & TimeWarner insisted on supplying their own, which I had to pay a nominal deposit on. ($15 I think.) I debated this with them for some time, to no avail. They supplied a Toshiba PCX-2600. Granted, it is better than the 1100, but I would rather own my own hardware.
As far as speed goes (data rate), I believe Earthlink sets caps into the cable modem of 5Mbps downstream, and 500kbps upstream. (I have not checked the internal settings of the cable modem yet. You can pay more, $72.95 per month, to get your cap up to 8.0Mbps down. (I don't know what the upstream speed is.) IMHO, it is obviously NOT worth the price, considering OOL is handing out 10Mbps down / 1Mbps up for $49.95 per month or less, around the block. I was immediately getting 4660kbps down / 360kbps up without any tweaking. (My machines were already tweaked for OOL.) After running the dslreports tweak test, and some others, there were no changes required, indicating that I was already tweaked. Hopefully, FIOS will hit the neighborhood forcing TimeWarner/Earthlink to boost their capped speeds for the same price, or forcing me to switch to FIOS. I was getting 9.5Mbps downstream and 950kbps upstream from OOL after tweaking, during slow (nighttime) periods. My ping latency to the CMTS (cable modem termination system) is consistently below 10ms, averaging about 9ms. I believe most users in this area are very happy with the data-rate provided by Earthlink Cable Internet Service, although it is not the fastest cable modem service in the country (OOL).
Earthlink provides dynamic IPs, using DHCP. I have not yet verified how often your IP address changes. (On OOL it rarely changed at all.) While a static IP may be desirable, I have had no adverse affects using their DHCP service. All traffic is exhanged using standard TCP/IP and DOCSIS protocols; PPPoE is not used. I have not experienced any problems with their DHCP and DNS services.
Regarding service, especially technical support, users have mixed reviews. I ahve not used any telephone support, and can not rate it, although it is probably as bad as most. I used their on-line troubleshooting service to attempt to set up my email with MS Outlook 2003. Unfortunately, they didn't have instructions for the 2003 version, and the ones they had for the previous version of Outlook really sucked. I had to screw around with it for hours, especially in setting up one of my 5 email addresses. (I believe Earthlink provides up to ten email addresses at no additional cost.) Eventually, I got it working, but have no idea what did the trick.
I have not yet had any outages, nor have I noticed any reduced performance in inclement weather (and we've had a lot). I am using Vonage for my telephone service, with one phone number and one fax number. It runs over the Earthlink Cable Internet service. On occasion, my called parties and I have noticed some 'choppy-ness' during our phone conversations. Most of the time, however, it is crystal clear. I am not sure if this was due to a slowdown on my network, between my firewall and the CMTS, or network congestion further upstream.
Services that are included with Earthlink are email, news server, and web support. Since the install, the email service has been excellent for me. I am using five (of a possible 10) email addresses. You can easily change your email addresses, passwords, and adjust other features, on-line. Earthlink is providing a spam-filter, and numerous other security software that comes free with the service. I have not installed nor tested any of them, preferring to go with my own mix of software. I have not evaluated their news servers, nor any of their other services, besides the connection, and their email services. I have rarely used any of their on-line support features, other than adjusting my email account parameters.
In summary, I think that if you have no other choice for cable internet service, you can't go wrong with Earthlink. Although I could have also gotten the service directly through Time Warner, I prefer not dealing with cable television services. The speed in comparison to other cable service providers, is maybe in the top ten in the country. The cost is definitely worth it for the value provided. So far the Earthlink system uptime has been perfect - 100%.
Update: its been four years. Earthlink here, is under the control of Time-Warner. Their fees have risen up to $45 per month. This has not made me happy. On the other hand, I have not had a system outage the entire time. Perfect uptime - 100%.
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