To persons w/ a cable modem

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Richard Royston wrote:
> I see that he (like me) appears to be using a part of the RCN organization 
> (erols) as his ISP. ... I have been unable, however, to get RCN to respond 
> to my enquiries about whether they have any intentions of providing cable or 
> cable modem service in my neighbourhood (Charlestown). Have you any idea how 
> to prod them to answer this?

I was a bleeding-edge adopter with them; got my RCN cable modem installed
on 3/11/99.  The Somerville system is one of their first 2-way networks;
in other states they have some 1-way (i.e. return path is via 28.8K or
14.4K modem) installed.

It doesn't work yet; their equipment vendor Hybrid Networks is also a
disorganized startup which rushed to market prematurely.  Service
worked OK for a couple of weeks back in March, but then as a nominal
number of customers piled on, bugs in the hardware (at the head end)
caused rapidly escalating packet-loss problems.  (This is similar to the
time I turned on www.zdnet.com through a quad-T1 circuit to Cable &
Wireless about 3 years ago.  C&W had just bought a frame relay box
which supposedly could handle 45 megabits.  It throttled as soon as it
hit about 2 megabits.  Oops.  Took days to fix.  Lost a major account.)

I have had a number of conversations with RCN tech support &
management, and am active in a couple of the erols.support newsgroups.
(Most RCN tech services are still under the Erols and Ultranet
names--a marketing mistake in my opinion; they should rename everything
RCN pronto.)  Basically, there's nothing anyone there can do to fix
these problems until the hardware's installed.  And they have minimal
staff in place; the hardware finally arrived last week, but it's a
major job and they have to dispatch people from Virginia to do a lot
of this work (scattered across about 10 states).

As you can imagine, given this chaos, their tech-support resources are
strained.  Their management has also clamped down on information given
to customers, in what I consider a misguided attempt to avoid
potential legal headaches or embarrassing spread of disinformation.
That's why it's hard to get through, and why you can't get any useful
information out of these folks.

I've noticed a fairly rapid ramp-up in staffing, so it's getting
better quickly.  Knock on wood, the replacement gear will work.

I'm not sure where to get a list of approved-for-construction cities.
City/town hall telecomm departments will have the definitive info.

-rich
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