Denial of Service

Dear Cablevision,

You suck.


Sincerely,
All of your choiceless customers.

To Clarify:

Cablevision has a near monopoly on television and cable internet service in the outer boroughs of New York. It shows.

Three websites, all of which at least somehow cover their "service," Optimum Online--cablevision.com, optimum.net, optimum.com/online--are all totally garbled and excessively saturated with links to useless services all leading to pages which take forever to load and usually fail to provide any useful information.

I believe Cablevision's approach to creating their various websites, there are more for their TV and their Voice service as well, was to ask themselves how they could make a website feel like a medical insurance claim. Yes, it's almost synesthetic.

Why the rant? Cablevision regularly has outages that last anywhere from 2 hours to 24 hours. Several times a year I have total internet failure. When ConEd had to do "brown-outs" for parts of Brooklyn and Queens this summer, their automated system called tens of thousands of clients to inform them of the fact. There was a press-release, everyone knew. When Cablevision has a "cablevision-out" there's no information on any one of their websites. Phone calls to their facility usually starts with the complete morons telling me to restart my computer, router, refrigerator, ironing board (i know it's not plugged in), reinstall Windows 3.11 and move my vegetables out of the crisper drawer. After I've done all that they tell me: "Well I see here that there's an outage in your area." WHY NOT JUST ANNOUNCE IT RIGHT AWAY? WHY NOT PUT A BANNER UP ON THE WEBSITE? WHY NOT HAVE A SECTION FOR "WE FUCKED UP AGAIN?!"

Yes, today is Blizzageddon 2010. Yes there are a lot obstacles today. The internet has been down for at least 15 hours (we know our whole building is affected). Cablevision's line has been busy that whole time (think DOS attack by an angry mob consisting of Brooklynites who aren't getting their YouTubes). Now, if you were a digital service provider with more online sprawl than L.A. wouldn't your first thought be: "Hey, let's give all of these customers, who are destroying our phone lines with their endless calls, some information on our endless bounty of websites. They'll be able to access that without having to talk to an operator or mess with their vegetables."

Anyway, AT&T is taking the hit for Cablevision today. My Nexus One has been working as a wireless hotspot since 9:30 this morning. Gotta love the unlimited plan!