(A) Broadstripe (representative) speaks up in the comments of a previous item:

We have been taking steps to improve High Speed Data services to your area. We have been systematically troubleshooting and repairing our nodes to provide exceptional service to our subscribers. Please contact us directly at earningourstripes@broadstripe.com so we can confirm if you’re (sic) concerns have been resolved with our recent upgrades or if we can do anything further to assist in resolving any on-going service concerns.

We’ve been pretty lucky here; we have not experienced the lengthy periods of complete internet outages many of you have reported and have repeatedly gone back and forth with Broadstripe over (many to the point of giving up on cable broadband entirely).

In my recent experience, I have seen some improvement: speeds during peak usage periods (evenings) are not nearly as horrible as I’d seen in September, but they’re usually only a tenth of the advertised speed of 15 megabits per second. At off-peak times, I have seen very brief peaks above 10 megabits near the beginning of a single download, but after a megabyte or two, the speeds appear to be throttled down to an average somewhere around 3 megabits, one fifth of the advertised rate.

As a rule-of-thumb, downloading one megabyte (1,048,576 bytes or 1024 kilobytes) should take:

• about 15 seconds at 500 kilobits per second (500Kbps).
• about 8 seconds at one megabit per second (1Mbps).
• less than one second at ten megabits per second (10Mbps).

I encourage you to run your own tests — real-world tests like downloading software updates or loading large web pages as well as speed tests performed through sites like speedtest.net and Broadband Reports — and report your findings in the comments.

Those of you who have experienced general outages: have they become shorter or less frequent? Has their support staff become more responsive and solved your issues?

Please also send your experiences back to Broadstripe.