Is Astound Broadband good?

RCN (what Astound took over) has served me well for the last 5 years. I would recommend them leaps and bounds over having to deal with xfinity.

You will find complaints about everything online. Astound/RCN is just another ISP, they are generally cheaper than Xfinity and offer decent speeds.

The short answer is no.

The long answer is that Astound Broadband is rebranded RCN internet. The speeds and reliability are generally okay. Their customer service can be frustrating if not downright awful. They will raise the cost of your plan every 11 months unless you call in and negotiate to be swapped to a new plan. They add unexpected fees and one-time service charges to your bill without informing you.

I used RCN which is now astound for years and wish my neighborhood was serviced by RCN so I use them in my apt.

Customer service was great for me, prices were competitive.

RCN has always been excellent for me but if that were true for everyone they probably wouldn't have rebranded to Astound.

YMMV

There are no good internet providers.

I had xfinity for many, many years. Any horror story you read about them is true. A few months ago my bill jumped ALOT and my wife freaked out and called them to see why. As it turns out they started data capping our service (after many, many...many years if I hadn't mentioned that yet) and was being charged additional charges for overages. They made this change without so much as a heads-up. We were furious and got on the phone with RCN (now Astound). After confirming multiple times that there are no data limits monthly we signed up. Fast forward to now while our service been great, we had an issue with our bill and not only did they fix the problem they gave us a discount on our next 12 months of service. First time in a long time a big company went above and beyond to show how much they appreciate new clients . Felt pretty good to have something go right for a change and not feel like we're getting screwed by another provider.

I live in the Gold Coast/river north area and I’ve never had an issue with RCN/Astound- not that I had a choice though lol since they’re the only ones that service my area. When I call them they’re generally helpful and nice. I also have never needed them to come in person - we have all our own modem/routers/extenders and we just need to call and be firm with them that we do NOT need a technician to come out, we just need to give them the MAC ID of the router, etc. I’ve never had an issue with connectivity at all.

Good:

-often cheaper than Xfinity/ATT/etc.

-More upload bandwidth than similar offerings (50Mbit instead of 35Mbit on high end xfinity, This matters a lot for things like HD conference calls, uploading large files to work, etc).

Neutral:

-Support isn't great, but no one in the region really has decent support except Google. However, it's still better than Xfinity or ATT.

-You have to watch your bill for upcharges (you also have to do this with the others).

Bad:

-It is inferior to pretty much all of the fiber solutions. Check if fiber is available in your area.

Me personally:

I'd go with pretty much any fiber solution first. They're cheaper, faster, and more reliable and do not come encumbered with nonsense restrictions. Absent any fiber options, RCN/Astound is better than Comcast or ATT because there's no data caps, and somewhat better upload speeds (which in my opinion are still bad and uncompetitive, but xfinity seems to get away with it for now). I didn't get great support with Astound, but i've had some of my most infuriating experiences with any company with Xfinity and ATT.

I was excited when RCN (their previous name) expanded into my neighborhood, because I was sick of ATT and XFinity's shit, but my experience with them was garbage. Never worked well, they'd send somebody out who would say "Oh, this wasn't installed right", and then charge us for a service call, happened multiple times. Finally called to cancel and they wanted to use The Force on me: "Sir, your internet is working just fine, sir" "I promise you, the fuck it is not" "SIR YOUR INTERNET IS WORKING JUST FINE" "K LoL Bye"

I know plenty of people who were happy with them so I was bummed, but I wouldn't use them again.

Make sure your building is wired for it. When we moved I set up service with Astound/RCN only to find out it wasn’t set up for fiber so we had to go with Xfinity.

To date no problems with Xfinity. If you do go that route I recommend buying a router to save yourself some money on your bill.

Side note: our old place had webpass for the building and that was the most consistent, solid service I’ve ever had.

Look at what the price jumps to after the first year.

No ISP is worth that much.

I swear by Xfinity. If it's hardwired it's going to work for you

I had them all of last year and just signed up again for my new apartment this year. They consistently offer gigabit speeds and I've never had any outages. Still very happy with them, especially for the price of $56/mo (if you have your own router)

Please try to find someone else - I work for them and they don’t take care of us either

well my internet got switched from WOW! to RCN and my bill went from $44 to $48 to $50 to $58 without any reason or notice. I'm on hold with them right now for.... 19:20 so far.

edit: I had some promo from WOW that expired. Now it's $63 a month for 500/50 and I could do 400 or 800 down but then maxed upload is 20. 20!!!! how can you send files or upload anything at 20? That's under minimum HD streaming. These companies cut upload speeds to save their own bandwidth and make you pay $$$$$ for a business connection if you want to actually upload anything.

They suck