Last week a story appeared in the Register Star, “Mid-Hudson turns down $3.5M in stimulus money“. This followed by two days Sam Pratt, always at the ready with in depth commentary, who wrote about the continuing failures of Mid-Hudson and the troubled life of a wannabe rural internet user in his blog posting, “MH Cable: Not tapping that grant after all“. Mid-Hudson Cable always gets a rise here. I posted the following comment at Sam’s article:

I sympathize with the troubles of those just beyond the reach of high speed Internet. Clearly bringing high speed access to everyone in the county is an important issue. However, the troubles of Mid-Hudson as an Internet provider go beyond their sluggishness at extending service.

I live right on Warren St, in the middle of MH’s most densely populated area, and their service level has been poor. They have never lived up to their advertised speeds. When we had 5 MB/s service it never ran better than 4 and the average over hundreds of data points was 3.6. I had technicians come to investigate. They pronounced my equipment to be up to snuff and left commenting “The advertising says ‘up to 5 MB/S’, it never gets there.”

Since I use the Internet for both my business coaching and web development work I felt compelled to cough up $5 more a month to get the 10 MB/S service. Now I get 7 MB/S until the evening when it slows down, as it did before, when all the other users come on line.

I believe that the contract between the city and MH is ending in 2013. Time to get ready to fight for some real service level standards that can be enforced. Or, let’s find another provider.

Mid-Hudson Cable continues to practice misleading, deceptive advertising practices with its pitch of “blazing speeds” upto 5 MB/S. The upto is Mid-Hudson’s bit of clever marketing. They never have delivered  close to that level of service.