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 Review by hulber 
UPDATED: 36 days ago
member for 4.4 years, 115 visits, last login: 2 days ago
 New York,New York,NY
 Business customer
 $123 per month
 about 4 days
 "High speed up/down; Good value; Reliable; solid upload speed"
 "Poor pre-sales; variable C/S resolution time"
 "Good now that I have it. Solid upload speed."
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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It took me a couple years to finally decide to go with RCN for a few reasons. First, depending on when I called the agents could not tell for sure if RCN was available in my building. Their internal systems for retrieving data like this must not be up to par. Then when I did get a business sales agent I found that they would only support a single static IP address in my location. I would call back every several months to see if things had changed. On some occasions I would get a callback and on others I wouldn't as it is often difficult to get a business salesperson directly. Recently I was forwarded to a good sales rep after being told by an agent they couldn't find that my building was available for service. The rep determined that I could get a block of IPs. Now, the next trick is to negotiate the price for everything since their "rack" rates are much more expensive than the promotional rates.
In the interim I would have signed up for TWC Business class but the rates have been much too high. For several years I have been using ADSL and most recently ADSL2+ but I have been looking for better upload speeds to support several services that I am running.
The time to get an appointment scheduled was very fast, in fact, I pushed it out a few days because of my availability. I was told that the appointments were for all day but that the agent put in a preference for the morning. The installer did not arrive in the morning and I did not receive a call prior to the installer arriving as I was told I would. On the positive side, the installer did arrive and was pleasant and professional. The installer did not have the static IPs with him so it took some calls between the sales rep and tech support to get that information. Everyone was responsive but it would have been much simpler if I had been given this information in advance or with the installer.
As a business customer, I was told that I don't have access to "My RCN" functionality so I don't have a way to view and interact with my account online. As others have mentioned, the options for making payments to the account are limited and cumbersome. They only accept Visa/Mastercard as credit card options and I have to do this over the phone.
I was able to sign up for rDNS but it took a few iterations of calling and emailing to get that order complete. I think it took about just over a week instead of the "up to 72 hours" they tell you it's supposed to take. It seems initial emails need to be screened before they go to a technician and this process seems to have some kinks where emails can get held up in their queue. I'm speculating but something like this is going on. I suggest that for best service that you call the customer service and talk to a service agent to get the process going.
So far the service has been reliable although as with most ISPs I see some moments of instability throughout the night for periods of a few seconds up to a few minutes. I assume ISPs are doing maintenance and things which can cause network interruptions.
I have 20/2 service. My download speeds seem to be fairly variable from close to 20 to as low as 5 but the uploads speeds seem to be relatively solid at around 1.9 which is more important to me.
I received the Toshiba PCX 2600 cable modem. The cost of this ($5/mo) is included in the monthly fee of 109.95 and then the rest of the $123 monthly fee is for a block of 16 ips (13 usable).
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