Back when I lived in Waltham, I got irritated by the over-charging and evil empire nature of Comcast and switched to RCN. With the exception of the fact that they were cheaper, I regretted doing so. The amount of incompetence at RCN is astounding. When I first put in the order to switch to RCN, the guy on the phone typo'd the house number in my address by one digit. You'd think this would be a fairly easy to thing to fix, no? But apparently (at least back then) their computer system had no mechanism at all for correcting an address typo, and could only change your address as if you moved. Over the course of the next few weeks after I noticed the typo, I spent a total of 6 hours on the phone with them getting it fixed, including: the day that I noticed the mistake, the next day when I came home to find I had no internet service anymore, the day after that when I came home to find I had no tv service, and the following week when I got my bill and discovered that my "new" account at my "new" address did not show the free month of service I was promised, and I was being asked to pay for the one month of premium cable that I couldn't afford and had been planning to cancel before I had to pay.

And then there were the two separate occasions when my cable got knocked out/unplugged from the side of the house, and I had the same experience with over-the-phone troubleshooting that someone else just described, but with the extra fun that on the first occasion I was forced to take time off from work to wait around for the tech to show up and fix it. Fortunately (with much effort) the second time it happened I was able to convince them that did not actually need me to be at home in order to fix the problem.

So yeah, I know people find them "friendlier" and all, but I really doubt I would ever, ever use RCN again.