RCN – Really Craptacular Nuisance

I just finished a leaf on the tea towel I am embroidering as a gift.  Not news, except for the fact that I picked up my needle and floss to pass the time while an imdb page was loading.  After a good few minutes, I gave up and hit reload.  Three times.  A lot of effort just to divine what year Weird Science came out.

My router isn’t the culprit, and neither is my wireless connection (I’m plugged in).  Instead, I have to point a finger at what has easily been the worst internet and cable service company I’ve ever worked with – RCN.  Tomorrow the relationship between us is severed; I’m counting the hours until Comcast arrives and I can blow a loud, wet raspberry in RCN’s direction.

I’m not a stranger to Comcast.  We used their cable and internet services for well over a year in 2007 and 2008.  They raised our rates significantly, and were unwilling to offer us any sort of alternative package to ease the strain on our wallets.  We turned to RCN in a last ditch effort.

Like most relationships, there was a honeymoon period.   I didn’t notice a slowdown in net speed, and the remote control that came with our cable modem seemed more intuitive than Comcast’s (I accidentally erased a slew of recorded programs over time due to being an idiot with Comcast’s remote).  Most importantly, the price was right at around $91.00 per month.  We here at mystaycation.com were a happy bunch.

Soon though, our agreeable union with our cable company began to unravel.  What I first noticed was that the revolving 25 or so free on-demand movies Comcast boasted were gone.  RCN offered three, under the Independent Film Channel’s on-demand station.  We sucked it up.  Scrolling the channel listings and DVR menu was slow.  We shrugged and flipped on.

Internet speed occasionally slowed to a crawl.  I felt the first twinges of annoyance.  What really bothered me though, was the inability for the cable box to perform the simplest tasks.  There’s a button on most remotes with which I am sure you are familiar; the “last” button.  Simply put, press it, and it returns users to the last station they viewed.  This never worked.  It always flipped back a few stations in the viewing history, instead of to the most immediate one.

Often when a scheduled recording was near, a pop up warning would appear on the screen; “recording about to begin.  Press ‘C’ to cancel.”  Recordings take priority over viewed channels, and the cable box would switch to the recorded program.  So say, on a night like tonight when I was enjoying a documentary about the plague and didn’t feel like catching a Family Guy re-run, I’d select “cancel.”  The caution pop up would disappear, but the box would still switch to the canceled recording and commit it to the DVR.

At first I thought human error was a factor.  Maybe we were hitting the wrong buttons?  It wasn’t a constant error.  Still, over time, and working to be acutely aware of each button selected on the remote, we realized the cable box was at fault.  This problem would be particularly annoying if we had paused a program a couple times and were behind in the broadcast.  Having our cable modem randomly switch channels would lose large segments of the show we wanted to watch.  Sometimes the desired program would be over by the time we managed to return to it.

What really got me riled up was that the cable box would stop recording scheduled programs all together.  Sure, missing Pawn Stars isn’t a huge loss, but it’s the principle of the damn thing.  The principle, man.

Our breaking point came when two small pieces of paper arrived at our flat.  One was from Comcast, promising a year lock on a monthly rate of $89.00, with free access to HBO and Starz should we come back.  The other was a bill from RCN.  Our rates had jumped by thirty dollars.  Until now, what bound us to RCN was the low impact it had on our pockets.  This was gone.

And with that, my breakup with RCN began.  Comcast has been called.  I’ve hated our current company for a while, anyway.  I expect to hand RCN a cardboard box full of its stuff and take my key back tomorrow.  So long.

Is internet access this important?  Yes.  Is television?  No, but I bristle at paying premium price for sub-par service.  That, my friends, is important.

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