Not underminning you Oni, but I think there are way to many factors involved in RR or any type of broadband service geographically, to say that the service as a whole is no good! Totally depends on where you are and how many people live where you live. How many people on your segment, what the segment consists of, etc.
I'm in a fairly populated area but never see my down speeds drop below 900kbps. Most of the time, speeds are upwards of 2Mbps. I have been using Road Runner for two years now and have only experienced 1 outage of more than 4 hours. Pretty impressive uptime.
Joker...are you using a hardware or software firewall with your cablemodem? Are you in an area were broadband is new?