Monday, March 8, 2010

Does Cablevision's WiFi service actually work?

Cablevision (http://cablevision.com) offers WiFi service on many municipal areas around Long Island. It's freely available to their Optimum Online customers - you just have to provide your user id and password to their login page and you're in. Read their spiel on the Optimum Online site.

Except it doesn't actually work. I have tried it from a number of locations in the past few months and it consistently fails in 3 ways.

1. It requires a new login each time. This is just silly. They could authorize you once and register your MAC address in their DHCP database.
2. Half of the time, you might get signal and an IP address, but they don't assign you a DNS server. This is just plain old fail.
3. When you do get a connection, IP address and DHCP server, their transparent HTTP proxy which redirects you to their login page is rarely responds. You just sit their waiting. My guess is that this is just severe under-provisioning.

But, it's a wonderful service on paper. It sounds useful, and as long as they don't deploy enough resources to make it work, it doesn't cost anything to provide!

1 comment:

Craig Plunkett said...

Tony, they do offer a MAC registration service so that you don't have to login all the time.