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First thoughts on RCN San Francisco broadband

I had RCN at an apartment I used to live in. Telephone was regular old telephone, with the internet access via cable. We got the whole package: telephone, cable TV, and internet via cable modem. I was satisfied with all the services. There was a gitch or two with installation, but they squared it away. There were occasional glitches with service (seems our external connections at the apartment weren't waterproof among other problems), but they got everything fixed and in satisfactory condition promptly.

Reply to
Phil Stripling
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A week ago I moved into an apartment building in downtown San Francisco that is served by RCN. I am told that fibre comes to the building. I signed up for the Mach 7 service, which promises 7000Kbps down/800Kbps up.

I am renting from RCN for $5/month a brand-new Toshiba PCX2600 cable modem, and may buy at some point.

My experiences and thoughts:

  • Just uploading, without downloading, on BitTorrent I was consistently able to hit 90KB/s or a shade below, not too far off the the 800Kbps promise.

  • The best download speed I've seen so far is 440K/s from a SourceForge mirror. Interestingly, I've been only able to hit 300K/s at most from RCN's own FTP site.

  • Although I don't need voice, it turned out that a package including voice will be the cheapest for me during the first six months. I had expected a Vonage-like VoIP adapter, but as it turns out the RJ11 jacks in the walls are still used.
Reply to
Yeechang Lee

(Hmm... my first attempt at a followup failed mysteriously, please excuse if 2 posts show up)

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There are not very many sites out there that will provide much faster access than 440K/s, which is basically 2.3x T-1 speed. If a site is public and expecting to serve a significant amount of users, and assuming they are on a fast enough pipe to begin with, it is generally prudent to bandwidth-limit on a per-connection basis, or else continuous downloaders with such high-speed access can effectively lock out dozens of others on slower connections, preventing them from getting successful downloads.

FWIW - the people I know in SF who have RCN cable service are generally happy with it.

Reply to
Philip J. Koenig

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