(no subject)

[neversent.livejournal.com]

does anyone know of any cable providers for somerville other than comcast and directv? do smaller companies even exist anymore?

Comments

[marphod.livejournal.com]

RCN is in Somerville.

DirecTV is a Satellite company, not Cable, as far as I'm aware.

[emblebug.livejournal.com]

I had RCN when I lived outside of Davis -- do they not exist there anymore? That would be sad, we always had a good experience with them.

[fanw.livejournal.com]

They still exist!

[emblebug.livejournal.com]

oh good. I seem to remember them being our only option where we lived, and they were always very helpful and patient when we had problems with our cable internet. Certainly a lot more responsive than the crappy-ass Time Warner here in NYC.

[dirty-devlin.livejournal.com]

I've had good luck with RCN so far.

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

I would not even try to get RCN. I just finally got rid of them as their service was beyond horrible. The broadband net connection was down more than up and they kept blaming it on us eventhough we actually know what we are doing (house of computer professionals) Even when presented with hard evidance that it was on their side of our hardware firewall and router they kept to the 'you have viruses' line, and 'did you try rebooting your computer'

Comcast has been super stable and it's cheaper even with the Digital Plus channel package. When we call up they know what they are doing and tell us if _they_ are experiencing problems and not just blaming their subscribers to try and stall.

[denonymous.livejournal.com]

Comcast has been super stable and it's cheaper even with the Digital Plus channel package. When we call up they know what they are doing and tell us if _they_ are experiencing problems and not just blaming their subscribers to try and stall.

That is, if 1-800-COMCAST isn't BUSY when you call. It seems that when there're outages, the caller queue on that line fills up faster than...uh, I don't have a metaphor for that.

I'll also mention that while I'd recommend Comcast overall, as I've been with them since the Mediaone days, they do have outages from time to time and in the past week seem to have been having some severe DNS problems. A lot of the time I can't resolve a damn thing, though the connection is still OK. Most recent example I have is last night around 7:00 or 8:00, maybe later. I managed to get into World of Warcraft while it was briefly up and didn't go back to my desktop for hours. It's not just me, either -- protogeek, blocks away, had the same problem, and my brother down in Holliston was experiencing it at the same time I was last Thursday or so.

Diatribe or not, though, their uptime is usually great for a residential connection and the customer service is average to "not bad" (sad, but that rates pretty highly).

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

I was talking to a friend that is one of Comcast's techs and he mentioned that when one of their main DNS boxes went down it's load got transfered to a national box that was already overloaded. He said that there was over 1500 calls in the queue on that one ;) Maybe they will take this as a sign to get more machines to reduce the load.

[mr-fancy-pants.livejournal.com]

You can try setting your DNS server to 4.2.2.2 (or adding it as a secondary).
Verizon's been having similar problems too.

[mrpet.livejournal.com]

...and whose server is that one, pray tell ;)

[neversent.livejournal.com]

Is basic or standard RCN cable any cheaper than Comcast? Their website isn't very helpful.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

I loved RCN when I lived in the 'ville. They're hands-down the best Internet provider (don't know much about cable tv).

[neversent.livejournal.com]

(sidenote) do you also post on s-o.org? we have a lot of the same lj friends.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

I used to. I was permanently banned.

[neversent.livejournal.com]

you're not missing much

[olszowka.livejournal.com]

I just switched from RCN to Comcast, but only because of a good deal. Comcast broadband seems a little faster, but RCN was fine. I did notice their news server had some sort of bandwidth limiter on it.

I've used both for cabletv and broadband, but never for phone.

Years ago I had trouble with RCN reliability, but not within the past 2 years.