 Review by Eat Me 
UPDATED: 70 days ago
member for 7.1 years, 998 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Sussex,Sussex,NJ
 $69 per month
 about 5 days
 "Fast download, reliable service over DOCSIS3"
 "30mbps tier is expensive, 100GB cap, could use more upload"
 "Passable for the only game in town."
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When I moved out here, I knew my broadband options would be more limited than living in a more populated area. But I was willing to accept that. Anyway, between cable from Service Electric/PTD and DSL from Embarq, cable won.
The 30MBps package is relatively new, but I do need the speed for work. 10MBps was the first package I had. This is an upgrade to 30MBps that I am reviewing.
I called up Service Electric, and they told me the 30MBps tier was $79.95/month with a $25 install charge for the truck roll. A bit pricey, but I was willing to upgrade, since I needed the increased upload speed.
Speeds are 30/2MBps. You can also get 10/1, 6/512k and 1/256k. I had 10/1. The lower tiers use a Motorola surfboard modem.
I ordered on Tuesday, they came on Saturday (at my request.) Cable tech was a contractor, as is usually the case for a lot of cable companies these days. He came, toned out my cable line, and told me he needed to run a new home run to the box on the side of my house. That was no problem. He went, opened it up, and I saw that they had run hardline all the way to my house. That was pretty good as it ensured low signal loss. He ran the home run, installed a new DPC2505 Scientific Atlanta modem. The modem has 3 bonded downstream channels and turned it over to me for testing. I ran speed tests on www.speedtest.net, got 28/1.8MBps which is close enough to the advertised speeds. Tests throughout the next week were close to that, and remain consistent.
Here are the parts I don't like. Upload is only 2MBps. I expected more for a $79.95/month service. Cablevision where I lived before (Wayne NJ) had OOL boost for $59.95 (If I remember correctly) and they gave you 5MBps upload, plus unblocked ports 80 and 25. Also, the terms and conditions say that they cap you at 100GB/month. Most people probably won't see that, but if you use a lot of VoD and VoIP you may see that being exceeded, in which case you pay $1/GB over. At least they don't advertise the service as unlimited, which it isn't. Lower tiers have smaller caps, with the 10/1 service for $41.95/month at 60GB/month.
The TOS also limits you to two computers in your house. Of course a lot of people exceed that and don't tell the company, and they do nothing, but I find that to be more than a bit ridiculous. Today, everything comes with an ethernet jack, from your TiVo to even your Blu-Ray player, PS3, XBOX etc. How on Earth are they limiting you to TWO computers? Even the actual computers in my house exceed two - My wife and I each have a desktop PC, plus we have laptops. Under the TOS I can only connect two of them. Ridiculous!
Well, as someone else said, they're the only game in town and they know it. I'll keep the 30MBps tier for a few months then decide if I'll go back to 10/1 and find an alternate means to do my work from home (such as using a terminal services client). Oh how I wish we could get FiOS here... Unfortunately we're stuck with Embarq, and I can only get 6MBps DSL here, yuck...
Update: they have lowered the price by 10 bucks to $69.99/month. Still expensive though.
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