As for the issue of packet-loss and reliability, when I came into this role some three or four years ago, on my first day we had an eight-hour phone outage. When we did the investigation, we realized that there was a DOS attack on the system and, hence, when the guys at the NOC were looking at it, they stopped all service to us. That was the first time. Four months after that we had a similar episode, but for a completely different reason. Within another year, we had the same thing. When we made the decision to go with RCN, packet loss was brought up. So far, and we're going on just about a year working with them, we haven't had a blip on the radar.

We've had 100 percent uptime so far. We haven't been down once, not even for a brief second, not even for a reboot. Nothing.

The stability has been great so far; no real downtime.

The uptime has been excellent. It's a stable solution.

The uptime is excellent. We're always up. We don't have issues. I can always reach someone. Someone can always call me. The stability of it is spotless. It's rock solid. Everything works great. There's no need to tinker with it. I'm sure people always tinker, but it's a rock solid product, stability-wise.

We haven't had a disaster yet. The only time we had something happen was when the City of Chicago accidentally, while they were looking for a water line, cut a bunch of fiber lines. It not only affected RCN, it affected the whole city block radius. Every person in the area was out and down. But they did a really good job and, within 24 hours, rerouted everything and had us back up.

Looking back at the traditional, stone age system, we had issues all the time. We had static on the line. We always had some type of issue with AT&T traditional phone lines and Vonage. If you've ever dealt with AT&T, their customer service is horrendous. The same with Vonage at that time. They were horrendous. It cost us money.

When we gave RCN a chance that all changed. We never had issues. Someone was right around the corner to pop in and take a look. 

The stability has been excellent. As far as uptime goes, so far so good. We have not experienced any outages that were not weather-related. I cannot speak to the issue of packet loss but, since implementation, the overall reliability has been excellent.

The weather actually affects the lines and, obviously, so does our internet, and electricity. Other than that, when we're on a call, we generally haven't had a whole lot of problems. But we have had issues where, with a storm, the lines go down. And we've had issues where we were dropping calls and that was dealt with by our RCN rep. There are external factors that RCN can't control.

I would rate the stability at nine out of ten. It's extremely reliable. Aside from some learning-curve glitches, we've had no problems with it.

The stability is very good. It's excellent.

The stability is very good. The system is up and running something like 97 percent of the time. We've had a couple of outages here and there, but nothing spectacular. A couple of the issues were caused internally, because of our setup.

We have a very unusual setup in that we actually have land and a building that are alongside railroad tracks and the rail company refuses to allow providers to do hard cabling in. We had to come up with a solution where we're doing a wireless connection from a building that we own which is two blocks away. Signals are shooting between antennas and then down into a cable system. Those two antennas had been up and running for quite a while, but at one point they both went down. We lost everything for a couple of days. 

What we realized is that we need a backup system. So we're using the DSL as a failsafe mechanism. If RCN goes down, we will switch back to the Verizon DSL, but we've not had to use that at all.