Metronet vs Mediacom

[dmclone]

I do IT support and I absolutely hate it when we get support tickets for users with Mediacom that are constantly getting kicked off their VPN or horrible speeds. I am certain they throttle VPN traffic as I have seen people with 500mbps or 1gb plans get worse speed tests than I do on just a 20 mbps Centurylink line. They test their home devices and they get normal speeds but their VPN I've seen some not even get 10 mb results. Of course Mediacom denies anything is wrong with their service even after we've replaced their machine and they still get dropped like they were on the original machine. Many times they press Mediacom more and they come out and replace a modem or find an issue with hardware in their box in the neighborhood or something but even after that still sometimes get speeds that are throttled while our users on other ISP do not see that.

I'm going to switch to Metronet once it's available in my neighborhood in Grimes. Our Centurylink has been very reliable and my wife has had no issues working from home on it but Metronet will offer much better speeds for about the same we pay now.

That's interesting info.

We had about 10k users go remote in just a few days. At least half of those are in the Des Moines area and probably 80% of those use Mediacom. Our experience has been:

#1 We originally told the users that they needed to be hard wired to their modem. We quickly learned that this wasn't going to be realistic. Our #1 issue is with wi-fi connections.

#2 Both Mediacom and CenturyLink have been surprisingly stable. Mediacom had one big outage last year that showed just how many people use mediacom. I don't remember the details but I think they had a line cut in Washington D.C. that brought everyone down.

#3 Our company VPN sucks and was not ready to go from a few hundred users to 10k+. When I'm on VPN my speed is 10mbps. When I'm off VPN it's 800Mbps+. We see this with all ISP's. If I use a personal VPN on my home PC, my results are a lot more robust.

#4 Remote support really sucks

 

[Cybone]

I laugh when I see the Mediacom commercials where they talk about needing reliable internet. They are absolutely correct, I need reliable internet…so I dumped Mediacom and went to fiber. No regrets and no outages!

 

[jsb]

Honestly, that's the first remotely bad report I've heard about them. I've been waiting for MiFiber to get to us for three years, to no avail. Mediacom's customer service is crap, but it's not as bad as it was. For me, it was that my wife and I kept getting kicked off our respective VPN while working at home. There are VERY frequent throttles or complete loss of service, some just for a second or two, that would kick us off. There's no fixing that issue with mediacom. A rep or tech has to be present when the outage is actually happening to have any remote shot at it getting fixed. I'm ready for some real competition.

this is interesting. I have problems with my work vpn and Mediacom occasionally. It only affects my work when I’m on a call. It only lasts a second or two.

 

[dmclone]

this is interesting. I have problems with my work vpn and Mediacom occasionally. It only affects my work when I’m on a call. It only lasts a second or two.

Voice doesn't require a lot of bandwidth but it needs to be consistent. We have people that have 5 mbps that work fine because it's consistent. If you're moving around the house on wi-fi, it's not always consistent.

 

[discydisc]

We live in rural Story county where they only hardwired internet available to us is DSL from Windstream, we got a cellular hotspot from T-Mobile in February, 50$ a month, unlimited data and 150 MB download speed. Would highly recommend.

 

[dmclone]

this is interesting. I have problems with my work vpn and Mediacom occasionally. It only affects my work when I’m on a call. It only lasts a second or two.

What are you using to take a call?

 

[jsb]

What are you using to take a call?

i should have clarified. I’m using Teams so I’m calling through my work system.

 

[BillBrasky4Cy]

I have heard mostly bad things about metronet. People agreeing to a deal then month after month go by without them hearing back from them.

I don't understand the mediacom hate. Yes there is an occasional outage, but I haven't had the bad experiences others of had.

I think most of the Mediacom hate come from people who lease their equipment. Once you have your owner modem and router Mediacom is actually really solid. I almost always get a higher speed than what I'm paying for too.

 

[dmclone]

i should have clarified. I’m using Teams so I’m calling through my work system.

Tell your network people to look into split tunneling.

 

[jsb]

Tell your network people to look into split tunneling.

based on the comments here, it’s not my company. It’s Mediacom. Most of the time my work is not affected by the 1-2 second outages that occur. But when I try to use it for calls, it is affected.

 

[Shawker]

I haven't had any connection issues with Mediacom. There have maybe been 2 or 3 times in the past couple of years where it was down for maybe an hour. I was having issues with slowness for a while but once I changed out the router and modem I was getting my paid for speeds so that wasn't a Mediacom issue. I'm paying about $75/month for 200 mbps which is the only thing I don't like.

 

[DBQR4CY]

Metronet is coming to Ankeny as well and the little yard signs are all over the SW corner of Ankeny where I live. Remember that it's 200mb down and up. That's big.

The technology fee, is that for any equipment rental? I have no issue buying my own fiber optic modem. We have Mediacom for the last 5 years and I bought my own cable modem when service was connected. I've never had a whole lot of issues with their service, but want to switch due to price. I would save $20 a month and double our speed and remove any data cap. We currently only have one Smart TV that's 4K and Disney+ is our only streaming service that we watch anything in UHD if available, but it's 7GB of data an hour, lol.

 

[cyfanatic]

Anyone use or looked into Starlink? It is all beta (and expensive upfront) at this point but I just went to the website and it says they are looking to deploy service in my area (near Cedar Rapids) around the middle of the year. I have no interest in using them as South Slope Co-op is awesome (IMO). But I do like the idea of what Starlink offers!

 

[Trice]

I think most of the Mediacom hate come from people who lease their equipment. Once you have your owner modem and router Mediacom is actually really solid. I almost always get a higher speed than what I'm paying for too.

If that's true then I would think some of these complaints would start easing with time. Mediacom recently switched to using eero, which I believe is what Metronet uses as well.

 

[BillBrasky4Cy]

If that's true then I would think some of these complaints would start easing with time. Mediacom recently switched to using eero, which I believe is what Metronet uses as well.

Yes and no. I'm sure mediacom isn't exactly offering up the equipment upgrade either.

 

[Trice]

Yes and no. I'm sure mediacom isn't exactly offering up the equipment upgrade either.

I agree, that's what I meant by "in time." Though I imagine as competition from Metronet heats up they'll be more aggressive in offering new equipment.

 

[CycloneErik]

I appreciate how my Mediacom speed #s dropped drastically immediately after the latest MetroNet promo ended, and I've gotten to experience a couple of outages to interrupt kiddo's school day.

I shoulda taken advantage of the deal.

 

[isufbcurt]

We've had Starlink for a month and it has been better than I could have imagined!!

 

[CYdTracked]

That's interesting info.

We had about 10k users go remote in just a few days. At least half of those are in the Des Moines area and probably 80% of those use Mediacom. Our experience has been:

#1 We originally told the users that they needed to be hard wired to their modem. We quickly learned that this wasn't going to be realistic. Our #1 issue is with wi-fi connections.

#2 Both Mediacom and CenturyLink have been surprisingly stable. Mediacom had one big outage last year that showed just how many people use Mediacom. I don't remember the details but I think they had a line cut in Washington D.C. that brought everyone down.

#3 Our company VPN sucks and was not ready to go from a few hundred users to 10k+. When I'm on VPN my speed is 10mbps. When I'm off VPN it's 800Mbps+. We see this with all ISP's. If I use a personal VPN on my home PC, my results are a lot more robust.

#4 Remote support really sucks

I feel your pain on all of that, saw similar stuff here too to some extent. VPN is going to slow speed down regardless because its a secure tunnel but man do we see a lot of people with strange issues that have Mediacom. We can take the exact same laptop or PC and run it over another ISP and get completely different results for speeds and even more strange is some of our Mediacom users do get some great speeds while others get horrible results. Only assumption I can make is something with their traffic throttles it as if maybe they think these people also are running bit torrent or something. Had one guy who went through 3 machines in about a week all experiencing just terrible connectivity and ping times and he swore to me he already had Mediacom out and they found nothing wrong. Had him press them again and next tech that came out found that the hardware in their box down the street hadn't been updated in a very long time and after they replaced a bunch of stuff he was getting great speeds so there is that issue too where ISP will not thoroughly inspect and troubleshoot legit issues.

Best connection I have come across was just the other week someone had 1 GB MiFiber and I was blown away with the ping times I was seeing on our end. On the flip end of that we have some users on a cellular or satellite ISP that don't understand that despite the supposed high DL speeds they are getting that their upload speeds suck because of the limitations those services have so that also affects VPN speeds. I'm ready to bring more people back to the office because while many people have had little to no issues working from home we have others with some horrible ISP setups or chronic issues that really just need to be working in an office to be productive.

 

[dmclone]

Dumb question, does Metronet use the same coax type connections as Mediacom. Could I use my internal wiring that is used for Mediacom today for Metronet?