Verizon DSL vs Comcast Cable

[Derek Atkins]

David Kramer <david at thekramers.net> writes:

>> I had to move from Speakeasy to RCN last year because my better half really
>> wanted cable tv.  Ugh.
>
> Why drop speakeasy?  We have cable TV and speakeasy DSL.  I can't possibly 
> convey how strongly I like SpeakEasy.  

You mean that speakeasy will give you 2-3Mbps downstream connectivity???
No?  Didn't think so.   But I can _consistently_ get this level of download
capability on my RCN Cablemodem.

I've had RCN CM Service pretty much since they started offering it in
Somerville with those old Hybrid cablemodems.  All in all I've been
fairly satisfied.  No, they don't provide 4-9 service; maybe 2-9.
Their outages are few and far between, but when then happen they can
be down for hours.  I think the longest was a full weekend (it went
down on Friday late-afternoon and, because it was a weekend, didn't
get fixed until Monday).  That was the most annoying outage, but that
happened once, a long time ago, and they've upped their service
significantly since then.

As for latency, I can consistently get 30ms RTT from my house to MIT
via 6 hops.  RCN is connected via the NOX, which gets me to lots of
places quickly.  No, this isn't as fast as a T-1 (which gives me 1-4ms
RTTs to MIT), but like I said for the 2-3Mbps downstream it's mighty
handy for certain tasks.

Also, I like RCN's basic cable service.  It's all unencrypted analog
service.  I get EVERYTHING on 2-97 (modulo their analog
HBO/Showtime/etc) without a cable box.  Can comcast do that?

Personally, I would hate to see RCN go.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available