I‘ve been an RCN (rebranded as Astound Broadband) customer for both cable + internet for at least 10 years now in the North Center area. In the early years, it was great and reliable outside of the occasional modem hiccup / replacement.

These days, it seems like absolute trash in the North Center area. Download speeds seem reasonable at around 200 mbps using their own Astound speed test here (http://md.speedtest.astound.com/).

Upload speeds however is where their Achilles heal is apparently, they drop to 0.5 or even 0 mbps upload speed out of a promised 20 mbps upload speed, which causes hiccups, stutter and complete audio drops during video conferencing with my company, causes lags, freezes and rubberbanding during games, even simple browsing and DNS lookups seem to stall out throughout the day and night.

I’m a Sys Engineer myself so I’m well aware of stuff like Pathping and other tools to further pinpoint the issue to RCN. Had my network guys at my company (a pretty large one) look at it and they could see unreasonable lag spikes as well.

I’ve done the following:

Replaced the modem around a month ago, it’s a brand new one
Had RCN come out and run a new line from the pole to my house (last year) when they thought that was the cause of similar spotty internet issues.
Of course, rebooted current and previous modems many times
Ran an Ethernet cable directly to the modem to confirm it wasn’t just my wifi router, my cables / wiring or anything else causing issues
Called them a number of times to no avail where all they seem to be able to do is either reboot the modem or send a guy out.

So now they are sending a guy out to my house on Monday and I’m starting to get near “last straw” territory and weighing options to switch to a different ISP. If it’s Comcast, I believe I may still have issues depending on the area and that RCN is using the same equipment and lines - is this true?

Either way, their Quality of Service is garbage and if they can’t maintain a simple Zoom or Teams meeting without hiccups, jitter, stutter & lag, and my own managers are noticing how poor my internet is over the VPN, then I feel they are not worth my time to go through the painfully slow process of proving to them that their network is trash. :)

TLDR - RCN / Astound seems incredibly spotty internet-wise. (Cable is fine.) Anyone else similarly frustrated?

Edit: They did finally resolve my issue by running a fresh line from the pole to my house. It sucks that it took three service techs and several months before I got a good pole / line guy, but service has been great ever since as of Feb 2024. If you’re in a similar situation, keep at their customer service!