3 Megabit Cable Modems, Anyone?

joelav22 writes: "I've got to move to San Francisco! RCN has upgraded current customers to 3 megabits of bandwith for no extra charge. In the days of all the bandwith chopping and caps, this is definitely a welcome trend. I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint."

Comments

Caching

[SpatchMonkey]

You can probably get away with things like that if you use transparent proxies to do web page caching, and so on. Or traffic shaping to make individual connections a little slower.

Call me suspicious, but I bet they have all sorts of tricks to keep the actual usage past their network down.

Great news! And one little inaccuracy

[forged]

Favorite quote:

• While other broadband providers are limiting their download speeds or cracking down on so-called bandwidth hogs, we've been working to give our customers even faster speeds at a terrific value.

Way to go, RCN! And take this, ATT, Comcast ;)

The inaccuracy was free of charge. It's only free for customers paying the Gold and Platinum ResiLink packages. For all other bundles, there is a price increase between $10 to $25 for the 3Mbits service.

Common Misconception?

[captainclever]

Quoting the story from yahoo:

"RCN Corporation (Nasdaq: RCNC - News) announced the launch of a new "super-charged" high-speed Internet service in its San Francisco and Los Angeles markets. Known as MegaModem(SM), it enables RCN's California customers to access the Internet at download speeds of up to 3 megabytes per second (Mbps), double the company's standard downstream speeds of up to 1.5 Mbps, and up to twice as fast as competing cable modem and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services. "

Shouldn't that be "3 Megabits per second" not megabytes?? 3Mbps (megabits-per-second) equates to theoretical maximum of 384 Kilobytes a second download, not 3 megabytes..doesn't it? :-)

Look like a good deal

[Rogerborg]

But it leaves you with a tough choice:

1. Use it responsibly to get faster downloads of the data that you actually want.
2. Get your snout in the trough and suck down everything you can before they admit that it's unsustainable and cut it, cap it, or start charging sensible money for it.

Incidentally, I'm in the first category, but I'm beginning to feel like I've been pretty stupid. Sure, I understand that "all you can eat" is just marketing blurb, and that the fees charged for retail flat rate services don't cover the ISP costs of using them to their full capacity. But why would the majority of customers understand or accept that? They're sold as always on, flat rate, all you can eat. A typical user (i.e. Joe Windows) would expect to be able to use them as such, which is why all of these schemes are doomed from the get go, and are just short term marketing schemes to attract customers (1. Burn money to attract customers away from other company's profitable schemes, 2. ..., 3. Profit!).

And so I'm inclined to say go for it, and leech like you've never leeched before. I know that's unsustainable, but the first sin is being committed by ISP's allowing their marketing droids to sell services as being all-you-can-eat, when that's just not true. Perhaps when they offer services based on an actual sustainable model them then we could consider supporting them. But as long as they're selling services that we know aren't going to work, purely to attract customers in the short term, then there's little point in being the only guy on the block trying to play by the spirit of the rules, because the letter of rules are going to change in the mid term anyway.

RCN Rules!

[linuxlover]

I have RCN at home (zip : 94401, San Mateo, CA - aka San Francisco Bay area). They give me the combo package with phone + cable TV + broadband.

The most impressed part gotta be their broadband. here are some stats
- mozilla dowload speed : 324 kB/s ( ~= 2.5 Mbps!!)
- people dowload from me on Limewire around 120 KB/s ( ~= 1Mbps)

Now that is just leaps better compared to any DSL or cable here. Eat that AT & Pacbell :-)

My new found obsession is Furthur (furthernet.com). And right now people are downloading from me @ 50KB/s. A buddy of mine is also on Furthur, but his upstream is capped at 15KB/s (~= 128 kbps). I told him about RCN and he is *seriously* thinking about moving to a place where he can get RCN :-)

So people, please, if you are San Francisco Bay area give these guys a try. I have nothing but good things to say about RCN.

IF you need further info see my website or drop me an email. /LinuxLover

BBB in Sweden

[Anonymous Coward]

If you already going to move, why not move to Sweden? :-) I've been using (among 50000 other households) Bredbandsbolaget for 2 years now. True 10Mbit transfer both upload and download. For this great service I pay just 225 SKR/month (approx. US$25). And _no_; I'm not resident of a Campus or something like that. Cable modems are just dull and slow.. ;-)

Nice... yet sad!

[kir]

It's really nice to hear that bandwidth in the USA is increasing... at least in San Fran.

It's SAD that I'm writing this from Tokorozawa, Japan via my 8Mb ADSL (3500yen/month ~= $30) that I've had for 6 months (My modem currently says 6.2Mb down, .842Mb up - I don't negotiate at max, but I'll take it)!!! SAD! I guess that article the other day was right - Japan really DOES get all the cool stuff first...

WAY FIRST! My sister-in-law, who lives about 10 minutes from me, can't get ADSL due to fiber in the middle. That's OK. She can get 2Mb Cable (again, about $30/month) or 100Mb FIBER ($90/month)! FIBER I SAY!

What you meant to say

[NiftyNews]

"I hope ATT and Comcast can take a hint."

I think you meant "I hope ATT and Comcast can take a check," because you aren't getting anything for free from those two price-gouging bastards...

That's good news, but ...

[dzym]

In the NY/NJ/CT tri-state area, we have Optimum Online, a service from which I've often obtained speeds up to 7, 8 Mbits/s.

The upload speed isn't too shabby either, I've sustained uploads at around 1.5 to 2 Mbits/s for periods of more than 1 hour at a time, according to my MRTG graph.