Charter Communications should get out of the internet business and stick with analog TV. It is clear they have no understanding of what they are doing. Just google - charter sucks - and see what you get.
When I first subscribed, I purchased my own modem. I was told I could do a self install. When I called to provision my modem, they would not do it without a "tech" coming out and checking it, "for safety." Charge to me, $50. After going up the food chain for an hour, I finally got the modem provisioned and got online with out the tech or the charge.
2 weeks later they turned the account off and again said it was required a tech to come out. Finally a week later, they got him out. He took one glance at my outside block and said fine and left. Later that day, the account was turned back on. Nice way to start out with a new customer huh?
This was five months ago. Since then the service has been terrible. The download speeds have not been close to what I am paying for, rarely reaching 1/2 of the 5 meg service I subscribed to. Since I did not want their TV service, they are billing me a total of $52 mth.
There have been a lot of outages, and each time I call, I get some person reading a script to trouble shoot. Then they want to send a tech out to check my modem and computer. And of course, since I own the modem, it would be a charge service call. Pass. Normally it clears up within a day.
Unfortunately for Charter, I have been doing computer networks longer than they have, and totally understand the logs and details my modem will provide to me by accessing it. My modem says the signals both ways are good, noise on the line is extremely low, and it should be working perfect, but it is not. The logs show that it consistantly trys to request things from the Charter system, but very often it times out due to no answer, or bad data from their machine. When this occurs enough times, the modem restarts. It does this a lot, way more than it should.
Over that last two weeks, I have seen the service go from poor to unusable. I have done some investigating from my end, and know this is what is called a head end problem. I even found the address of the machine that is having problems. So I called their corporate office tech support to give them this information. No one there had any idea how to pass that information on to the appropriate people. Nice huh? So, I opened a ticket with them, three days ago, and so far, my service is still unusable.
Last night I called again, and today they sent a tech out. He confirmed it is NOT my equipment, and even told me that they were aware they had a head end problem that was affecting modems all over the area, but that the guy who works on that is off weekends, and they will get it fixed some time next week.
I don't think so...
Tomorrow I am going to purchase an ADSL Modem and Monday I will be an AT&T customer.
Bottom line, I have always favored Cable over DSL for speed and up time, but here in Georgia, that is not the case. Checking around, I found that all my neighbors have left Charter Internet for AT&T and now AT&T will provide DSL without having to also purchase a land line. (I use VoIP phone service so do not want to pay for a land line.) They provide higher speeds at the same cost too.
I just did a test, and at this moment, my download speed is 74KBps and upload is 117KBps... To ATLANTA, 26 miles and 6 internet hops away. It should be more like 4500Kbps down, and 500KBps up, so clearly something is wrong. I know it is their issue, They know it is their issue, but they couldn't care less. They will get it fixed in their own sweet time. And no, they don't normally credit for down time.
If you are looking for HighSpeed Internet service in the Atlanta area, go DSL, and no matter where you are, stay the Hell away from Charter. If they are the only choice you think you have, Please - google "Charter Sucks" and get the education first.
Dr_in_ga
McDonough, Georgia
U.S.A.
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