Review by srr2 
UPDATED: 247 days ago
member for 6.6 years, 1182 visits, last login: 38 days ago
 Bethlehem,Northampton,PA
 $110 per month (12 month contract)
 about 7 days
 "Cable modem, TV and VOIP Phone in one package"
 "Customer (dis)Service, Tech (non)Support, Flaky VOIP phone"
 "I'm hoping for an alternative provider after the contract period"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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[Update] The Mach 20 is in and mostly it does what it claims, though there are times when network congestion obviously slows things down. The 250KByte/sec upstream is very nice.
The downside of this was the incompetent offshore barely-English-speaking tech support, incompetent customer service, and horrific billing screwups. This brings back all the problems I remember having with RCN a long time ago. The story is long and involved, that all in all amounted to something approaching 10 hours on the phone to them (mostly on hold) and being passed around from rep to rep, many of whom failed to do what they said they were going to do to - maybe - get all of it straightened out.
Would I recommend RCN to my neighbors? No. I can tolerate it because there's no viable alternative right now. VZ DSL has gone down the drain here and Service Electric still hasn't upgraded this area to two-way. [/Update]
I was a very long term RCN customer with TV and One-Way cable modem but dumped them when Verizon made DSL available. Verizon's DSL was great at first, but in the last year has suffered from over subscription and congestion at critical points. A few weeks ago, the friendly RCN home sales guy showed up with the news that they'd rebuilt my area with the latest digital equipment, making a two-way cable modem available for the first time. So with Verizon's poor performance and RCN's promises, I decided to give them another chance with one of their bundles. Since it's been only a week, this is mostly first impressions.
The install went quickly and smoothly. The only reason I waited a week for it was that it took that long for Verizon to release my phone number. Once in, everything worked right away as expected.
There's been only one noticeable glitch so far has been some odd behavior of the phone, dropping calls that have been in progress for more than 15 minutes. That could be nothing at all, or it could be a real problem. Only more experience with their phone system will tell which it is.
Performance of the CM so far has been very good, running at full speed nearly all the time. There's occasionally an artifact that looks like it might be congestion, but for the most part, Mach 10 is delivering slightly more than 10Mb/sec consistently. At this moment I'm awaiting an upgrade to Mach 20 and it will be interesting to see how well that holds up to its potential.
The only question lurking in the back of my mind is whether RCN (and consequently the performance I'm seeing now) is going to be a victim of its own success.
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