RCN business services reliability and bandwidth

[Jerry Feldman]

My company is in a Regus office and after a communications "upgrade" we
are now on a shared LAN with a maximum bandwidth of 2Mbps (symetrical).
Previous to the "upgrade" the office had something like 3 T1s and we all
shared the available bandwidth. Not only that, we are paying about
$800+/Mo for that service and 6 static IPs (1 dedicated to our VPN the
other largely unused by requested by our IT people).  To add to this,
when we got the new connections, I was able to run some tests, to
compare the old and the new. As an example, under the old (AT&T
backbone) I could ping blu.org in under 20ms, and under the new carrier
(Level3) it is rarely under 70ms. A traceroute shows a lot of latency in
the level 3 centers in Cincinnati and Chicago. This affects how people
work at home. Our products are Linux based financial risk analysis
programs. So when one of our financial or integration engineers logs in
from home, they have to log in through a Toronto based Citrix server
then connect to the Boston servers. So when they run our product it is X
over IP, which is very slow (and considerably slower since the upgrade).
We have been offered a dedicated 1.5 dedicated (for the same price) or a
3.0 dedicated (by fiddling with some other figures it would be slightly
higher ~120/Mo).  Additionally, we do a number of Webex presentations.

RCN's service is assymetric 20Mbps/2Mbps for a savings of several
hundred bucks a month. They will also be increasing the upload side
supposedly by the end of the year. They are also giving us 8 static IPs.
at a significantly lower price than Regus. My question to this list is
basically what your RECENT experience is with RCN. has there been any
network outage where the Internet has been down for any significant time
period, or have there been many short outages. For instance, in our
case, even a momentary outage could knock a Citrix session offline. In
addition to outages, what has your experience been with bandwidth. Are
you seeing their advertised bandwidth, or a much lower bandwidth.
(Because of the X over IP the upload side is important).


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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