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And this week's Bad Timing Award goes to: RCN's advertising agency

By adamg on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 7:52am

For booking the following ad on Boston-area Web sites when RCN's Internet service goes down for 2,500 local customers around 7 p.m. on Tuesday and then stays down through Wednesday morning.

RCN ad

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Boston
Free tagging: 
RCN


Ad:


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Comments

By anon on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 10:24am.

I wouldn't worry too much if I were RCN. After all, I don't know a SOUL with Verizon DSL that doesn't have a close relationship with a Verizon call center employee or two. Verizon goes down more often than a submarine, and their "nation wide" cell service doesn't even cover places like Gloucester. Never the less, their commercials brag about speed, coverage, etc. If they spent half of the money they spend on advertising on their service, there might (might) be something to brag about.

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By adamg on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 10:30am.

Our first couple of weeks with Verizon DSL really sucked. Turned out to be partly their problem (something with the wires on our street and the fact they let me buy the highest DSL rate when we were right at the service edge for our central office), but also due to problems with the 1930s-era phone wiring in our house (go figure). They fixed both issues and we've been trouble free since, save for one regional outage that was annoying mainly because their network techs obviously never talk to their service techs, one of whom put me through the whole reboot-your-modem exercise. Other than that, though, I'm quite happy we're paying less for more bandwidth than we got with our previous provider (Speakeasy) with the same overall reliability.

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By anon on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 2:18pm.

It's also quality. Speakeasy is a better company to earn your money than Verizon. Speakeasy will stand up for your rights as an Internet citizen and defend them - Verizon may be the least offensive of the telcos, but they'll still throw you under the bus at the whim of the content cartels.

I'm on FIOS because it's silly to take DSL over FTTH, but if I were stuck with only DSL as an option and Speakeasy serviced my area, I'd go with them in a heartbeat.

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By adamg on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 2:45pm.

A couple years after Best Buy bought them, they abandoned the residential market. Even though I run my business on the Internet, I don't need 5 nines reliability - or the huge premium they wanted to upgrade us from sub-1M service to just 1.5M.

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By Jeff F on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 11:29am.

Can't find anything from RCN saying 2500 people were out.

Fwiw, I live just a few blocks from you Adam, and I didn't lose internet. I've been seeding several big torrents (yes, legit) for the last few days, and so have a good log of my ul/dl bandwidth.

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By adamg on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 4:08pm.

http://twitter.com/RCNconnects/statuses/1898665996...
http://twitter.com/RCNconnects/statuses/1900521538...
http://twitter.com/RCNconnects/statuses/1901263206...

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By Jeff F on Thu, 04/12/2012 - 4:16pm.

Again, not saying it wasn't that bad, but if you're going to post an article which claims a specific and fairly significant outage from a large utility, it'd be nice to see something more solid than third hand reportage.

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By anon on Wed, 04/11/2012 - 1:40pm.

The worst bit of advertising timing I've ever seen as during one of the final episodes of Battlestar Galactica where the one character commits suicide by shooting themselves in the head. They then cut to a commercial for Campbell's Soup or some such where a cracker falls into a bowl of tomato soup causing a big jet of it to shoot out. All set to the song "I just wanna celebrate, another day of living!"

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