RCN slow at night in Somerville

[lefauxfrog.livejournal.com]

If you live in Somerville, use RCN for internet access, and notice dramatic decreases in speed during weekday evenings you're not alone.

I found this discussion board thread on DSLReports.com where people are gathering reports about the problem. Apparently someone who works for RCN is monitoring the thread and looking into it.

To save you some reading, here's the latest from page three:

I don't believe this is any sort of issue at the node or at your house, it looks to be a issue of congestion and available bandwidth. Let me do some digging and I'll will post a reply shortly.

Comments

[ifotismeni]

awesome. i have been noticing this as well, it's been really annoying. (i live in arlington, right on the somerville border.)

[philbot.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Keep us posted?

[afty.livejournal.com]

I am participating in that thread, with the same username I have here. I have called in to tech support and gotten the run around with them. It finally appears that someone at RCN has taken notice and acknowledged there is a problem.

FYI, the speeds are night are really, really terrible. Last night I was seeing 0.17 Mbit down, and I am on the 10 Mbit plan - less than 1/50 of my rated speed. If you are on RCN, you can test your speeds here:
http://ma.speedtest.rcn.net/

[duffless2323.livejournal.com]

They certainly aren't charging you less for the reduced service, I'd ask for a discount off your monthly bill.

[avacon.livejournal.com]

I've been seeing the same problem for a few weeks now, also located near Davis Square in Somerville.
It seems to be manifesting itself as first-hop latency (to the default gateway) increasing from a fairly reasonable 5-10ms to well over 100ms. This seems to occur daily during the evenings, ramping up around 6-8 pm and continuing until a little after midnight.
The 100ms+ latency will also limit your max download speed given the default TCP receiver buffers in most applications, but it is even more painful for interactive applications.
Latency is also where you'll notice the "slowness".

I haven't yet tried calling RCN about this issue.
(I'm guessing it may be returned Tufts students
playing games and otherwise saturating the network
in the evenings?)

Here's an example of what the latency has been looking like over a day and week:

Dump RCN...

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

Poor service.

[mrboboto.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, I'm on Cedar St (so a little bit farther outside of Davis Sq.) and have not had this problem. Of course, I have a different problem where my connection intermittently drops on Saturdays and Sunday between 12-6 PM, but only when it's sunny, but I think that's an act of God.

[lefauxfrog.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of dumping RCN and moving on.

Is Comcast any better? I haven't used their service since I lived in a different part of the state several years ago.

[mrboboto.livejournal.com]

RCN's customer service is much, much better than Comcast's. And RCN's customer service is not that good.

Re: Dump RCN...

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Comcast is no better.

[closetalker11.livejournal.com]

No, Comcast isn't any better. For one, it's much more expensive. Second, their customer service is not great (although I will admit that the last 2 times I called, it was MUCH improved, like enough that I think they're contracting to a new customer service place). I don't know much about RCN, but it's not unusual at all to have either my TV or internet blink on and off intermittently throughout the evening -- this has actually increased substantially over the last two weeks, much like with RCN.