RCN Chicago's Idea Of Service

Excuse the local PSA for a moment, Cathode readers - though I suppose RCN internet users of other markets may want to pay attention anyway...


For awhile now, The Girl and I have had some troubles getting high quality video running on the old Roku. For the longest time I figured this was just a technical issue with the old wifi, and so I strung 300 feet of ethernet to plug it all in directly from the source so that we (and in particular she) could appreciate some quality entertainment.

I pay for 10mb service from RCN here in Chicago, which is far and above the connection speed Amazon recommends. This is a service that RCN widely advertises here in Chicagoland.

Problem? They can't actually deliver on that service. When we tried to rent an HD movie from Amazon, we simply couldn't watch it in anything less than a couple of dots after some time ... in other words, we rented an HD movie only to watch in blocks.

Why?

Heres why:

Now, while this is off my iPhone and off WiFi - it's not like I was taking this reading from the street or anything. Sure, I would expect some degradation from WiFi and whatnot - but ... this reading is showing a 0.66 download speed and the lesson here is simple:

RCN was selling a 10mb service. From WiFi I was getting less than 1. When I looked at the wired connection? I was getting about 2-3. Sometimes less. The speed is utterly unreliably and usually under 5.

RCN admits this is a problem on their end - but their technical support says that the "capacity upgrade" has no estimated time of delivery. Which is interesting, since I had an estimated time of delivery expected from me when I signed up for the service, although it has been over two weeks now and RCN has shown absolutely nothing from their part for the same. The best I can get, in fact, is "no estimated time of delivery".

So RCN in Chicago advertises a service to which they can apparently not technically deliver - and just tonight I got an email from The Girl that not only was nothing new being done about it, but that our service was actually completely down for the entire night.

Utility companies need to be made accountable, because they will for sure not it for themselves. I would encourage anyone to check their Internet connection compared to what they pay with a simple run of Speedtest.net - but especially if you have RCN in the Chicagoland area. If I'm getting this level of service, there's a good chance you are too - I'm pretty certain few people in the Wrigleyville area are getting what they actually pay for...

And for the record - RCN customer service has been abysmal. I've been hung up by the automated service twice and left on hold for nearly a half hour at least once. I've never gotten a straight answer as to the problem or when RCN will solve it - leaving me to wonder if they're even capable of fixing the issue at all.

Anyway: here's the PSA ... we live in a world where we may pay for exacting Internet service which we only use at certain times, but that fact does not change the fact that we have a contract with a company to deliver that service. I don't care if you pay for speeds to deliver pictures of cute kids or to achieve a better frag count online ... you pay for it, but sadly only you will police it. Nobody on this planet will check to see if you're actually getting the net service you pay for ... there is no regulatory body for it in existence. It's just a contract between you and a business.

Which is why the Better Business Bureau is probably my next step. RCN's response at this point is completely atrocious - and I worry not just for the fight I've got with them, but the fight many of their customers may not even realize they are entitled to have.

Large Hadron Status Check

Hilarious.

Another Sign Twitter Might Be Off

Just this week two people, whom I'm not sure who they might actually be, signed up for my twitter feed.

That might not sound odd unless you go see my twitter feed. And that's the way it's been since day one. And probably the way it will remain. I've given twitter a bit of a hard rap, although I can finally get the appeal a little more as I browse Facebook status updates - essentially the same thing with, as it seems to me, less noise. I guess I live a life on the Internet where that can be a wildly lovely thing.

(Brin, Corv - sorry to have lead you to the dark cobwebs of twitter at somepoint...)

In pretty unrelated news, my old place of employ got their redesign out the door. This was a complicated affair and as I put it to my boss this morning, I'm happy to be simply whelmed.

What's Old Is New Again

This picture was cheerfully lifted from this article, talking about integrating rich media elements with consumer electronics for fancy information age mashups (more or less).

What's crazy is that when I saw that picture, I realized I had seen it before. Or rather one very, very much like it. I was at a conference in San Francisco held by a company some people might have heard of called Netscape where they were illustrating their new flagship, Communicator. Communicator was Netscape's salvo into what they thought would be the next generation of browsing: a one stop shop of information integrated deep into your computer where you could pick your email, schedule your life and get information pushed to you whenever it wanted.

At one session they pondered - why stop at computers? why not televisions? And showed a mockup of a baseball game with Internet fed information scrolling on the bottom. TV channels and push channels - all rolled into one.

Of course, another company we might have heard of was a bit annoyed at the idea of Communicator being the core location of their own flagship and spent many a dollars putting it back into a much smaller box.

And that certain company is not completely to blame, mind you. Communicator was full of weak points. Push channels never really took off. We now live very comfortably with their simpler, more portable and more maintainable cousin - RSS. Webtops in general were a pretty buggy affair (and I should know, I hacked one together for State Farm capable of launching Windows apps). Instead we have a modern web app world, where you don't really need either a webtop or a monolithic application capable of running all your apps in one stable.

But over a decade later, it's interesting how the song very much remains the same. It's a big world of information out there - and sooner or later it will get crammed onto my big TV.

Why My Wi-Fi Closed

For the record, I completely agree with the sentiment expressed in this Wired article, in fact it is in pretty much lockstep with why when we moved I went ahead and left our Wi-Fi router completely open. Little risk, small benefit to a passer-by or neighbor and a lot easier for setup.

Then a couple weeks ago my connection slowed and started dropping. I went to check the router logs only to find that the D-Link was staving off a middleman spoof attack. It didn't look like any real damage was done, but it was chewing through the logs at a breakneck pace. I put on encryption and a password ... and it's been running perfectly fine ever since.

It's not a big deal, but it reminds of the kind of thing that spoils the net. Like spam has nearly killed e-mail as being the kind of social tool it really could be - malicious attempts like this one spoil what could be an open and free Internet.

The Myth Of Cyber Monday

Being somewhat attached to the Internet professionally, the term "Cyber Monday" continues to gain some speed every year. For the record, Cyber Monday is marketing stunt pulled off by Shop.org, a prominent online retailer association. As Snopes points out, Cyber Monday is rarely a big day for online sales - the month of December alone pretty much eliminates any chance of that as procrastinators wait until the week before Christmas to get their last minute items shipped to them. Actually, I think Black Friday still regularly outsells Cyber Monday.

Still, I probably do about 90% of my holiday shopping online and honestly this year might be more like 100%.

Google Maps Paranoia

To continue along the theme of the illogical:

The new Google Maps zoom feature zooms all the way into my living room window. See cat on cat perch.

I'm all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I'm going to look into whether it's possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. Meanwhile, I'm happy to show bb readers the photo in the interest of illustrating creepy privacy violations. Heck, the whole world can see him anyway.

-- Boing Boing: Google Maps is spying on my cat, says freaked out BB reader [BoingBoing]

Followed shortly by another BoingBoing reader who is afraid that *gasp* they might be able to read your license plate!

Wait. Isn't the idea of having a window to allow people to see inside, as well as being able to see the outside? Assuming the cat lady has, you know, neighbors - then this so called invasion of privacy isn't exactly anything new. OK, so some fraction of the net who were looking for an address might now join the numbers of people who either live near, drive around, walk past or bike by this address. Hey, I know - how about alerting one of the largest blogs on the net about it? That's an excellent solution for someone who wants their privacy respected.

Look - someone could be staring into windows right now ... right as we speak. Most likely - it's a complete stranger. Google has nothing to do with that fact - it has been there all along.

And license plates? Someone is worried about their license plate being visible? Realizing of course that if your license plate is not visible that's breaking the law? Because the idea of a license plate is to be publically visible?

The White House has insisted that it has the right to eavesdrop on any citizen, to detained Americans for years without prosecution and use "extreme" interrogation to meet its end.

But by god - let us worry about someone's cat being in a picture on the net.

War In The Internet

Alice has reports from the front of an insidious, invisible cyber war:

A war is being waged online, it is being waged on and for your computers, and it is being paid for by spammers. These groups create huge botnets by sending out email worms, they then lease time on these botnets to spammers, who do their thing and spam the rest of us. Now, each of these groups want to own it all, and the attacks are increasing, remember the Storm Worm? This is a video showing how fast the Storm Worm spread.

-- The Internet Battlefield [RealTechNews]

On one hand it's a grim and awful picture. I lost a whole domain and an age-old email address under the weight of spam. Lawmakers can barely understand the "intertubes" much less defend the citizenry from this kind of plague.

On the other - it would make a great game. Somewhere inbetween GalCon and Uplink.