Spectrum Internet service in West Virginia sucks. They sucked 18 years ago when it was Time-Warner and they still suck.
During the 2010s I was on Frontier DSL. It was fine but I needed more speed and I knew more would never come because I was at the maximum distance from the CO. They were even nice enough to hook up two line cards in parallel and four wires to give me good service. No complaints given the technology of the time.
In 2019 I decided to switch to Spectrum and got their fastest service, 40 Mbps. For a couple of years it was okay. Then they switched me up to 80 Mbps at no increase in cost. Great. It actually delivered 65 to 75. No complaints.
Then, about 18 months ago, the service started to degrade. It got slower, but more importantly it began to have service interruptions. It would just stop for 1 to 2 minutes with no throughput. Then start up again until the next interruption. I thought maybe it was my setup here. Rebooting the router didn't seem to have any effect on the interruptions.
Recently I was speaking with a friend here who lives about ten blocks away, also on Spectrum, and she said "Spectrum service is terrible. I have security cameras and there are 1 to 2 minute long gaps where there's nothing. Terrible." Then I knew it wasn't just me.
So now I'm looking at Frontier again. In the meantime, Frontier has been going full speed installing fiber. They installed fiber in my neighborhood about six months ago. My workplace, which is 3 blocks away, has been looking for a better solution. Their DSL is getting worse and worse and when it's out, the credit card machine doesn't work. Not okay. It's a huge headache. So they decided to try Frontier fiber. I thought okay, this is a good test of whether I'll get fiber at my home.
So far it's been solid at work. Not only that, I finally gave it a test tonight. Oh, my goodness, it's quick. They went for the cheapest, slowest service. Yet I did a 265 megabyte download in 5.3 seconds tonight. That's scary fast. I like it. I think I'm going to do it.
Last year that was a problem in my city. Turns out they had contractors upgrading the HFC network to remove the 7 - 280 MHz amplifiers / repeaters and install modern DOCSIS bi directional 2 gigabit repeaters and amplifiers. 12 months ago they began offering 940 megabit by 940 megabit service. I suspect this is what they are doing in your area.
Full disclosure - I hate Charter / Spectrum and have fiber at home through an alternate provider.
@HopelessDemigod Yeah, the starting and stopping is really bad. It's happened several times this morning. "Cannot reach server..." (Amazon. Hah.) Yah, sure. Error 500s on Mastodon. Have to click several times to get a post to go or a like.
They're stringing fiber on the next street over right now. I walked past their setup last night around midnight so took a look at the 5 foot spool. The fiber optic cable looks and feels just like Belden 9913 and is made by a company in the USA.
But yeah. The restaurant has the lowest cost service which is either 100 or 250 Mbps, yet for my little test it delivered 500.
I have many years experience with the incompetence of Time-Warner / Spectrum's technical department. (misconfigured routers, large segments of the Internet blocked years before in order to stop spam and they don't know how to unblock it. They didn't believe my tracerouting so I ended up contacting Level 3 to prove to them their routers were misconfigured. It was pathetic.) Anyway, I could go on and on. But I've had just about enough and with fiber passing a few feet from my house now, it's time to do something.
