Astound → [Connectivity] Multiple drops and spotty customer service - Lehigh Valley

Where to begin. In the past month we have been dealing with daily drops of our digital telephone and internet service, varying from once to multiple times a day, ranging from a few seconds to a few hours. My wife works as a customer service rep from a home office and every time the internet drops she loses connection to anyone she was talking to on the phone (VOIP via VPN, not the RCN digital phone service.) This causes her employer to have her stay offline for a time to verify the connection is stable again. After 9 (or 10?) visits from RCN, with multiple changes of cable heads, cable modems, and splitters, both inside and outside the home, they finally determined the cause to be a corroded connection on a pole over a mile from our house. Since that fix we had no drops (that we've noticed anyway) for over a week.

Yesterday we had another outage of 4 hours right in the middle of the work day (noon to about 4pm). Another day of lost time for my wife. Called RCN and they schedule us for 8am to 10am. I call back at 10:45am this morning as no tech has shown up. Turns out they changed it to 8am to 9PM with no requirement to be home. Only problem is they never called us to tell us that. We are still waiting to find out what this visit will find.

We've spent a lot of time on the phone with RCN and I have to say I'm not terribly impressed with the service. It seems like the first level support doesn't know what they're talking about half the time as we were constantly getting conflicting stories about what was going on compared to what the technicians at the house were telling us. The technicians at the house varied greatly as well. We had cable heads replaced incorrectly on the first visit that made the problems worse that had to be corrected on later visits. We were told it was bad cable from house to common box, then taps between common boxes, then some external noise outside our development (which appears to be the actual cause).

On top of all that we were given about a $50 credit for lost service. This pales in comparison to the accumulation of hours of time lost for my wife's job, which is not paid time off.

We've been with RCN for 15 years at this address, and another 5 years at a previous address. This is by far the worst experience we've had and if I had an option to switch to another company I would. Unfortunately when our development was built, the builder made a deal with RCN for exclusive cable access, blocking out competitors.

Just needed to vent.

Xanthusuo - It sounds like you had a rough time for the last several weeks. I am sorry it took so long for us to determine the cause. Unfortunately, sometimes the cause is not easy to find. I hope everything is working well for you now. I am glad that you took the time to vent and I will send your feedback to both the call center management and your local market management. Your account has been well documented over the last two months which will help with coaching our people.

Emilie

Was your TV service out during that time, too? Would be interesting to know that. Also, if you had had RCN's phone service, would also be interesting to see if that was out.

Currently I'm out of reach of cable, but at my old house we had Blue Ridge and there would be times when even if the internet was out, the phone still worked, or the TV worked and no internet, etc.

Not sure about TV, we stream shows more often than watching TV in the summertime. Phone was out, but again, we have the digital phone service (phone connected to the cable modem). The phone usually dropped first and then the internet.

I thought you said you had VOIP? The "digital phone" that cable companies offer is NOT the same as VOIP.

TV doesnt rely on constant 2 way communication like video on demand, phone and internet so thats why it can continue working.

My wife's work at home phone is VOIP, through a Juniper router with internal VPN. Our household phones are digital phone service.