[Madlug] Re: Experience with Charter?

Wed May 6 19:53:49 CDT 2009

Charter is awful.  We have a direct fiber connection from Charter at work.
In the 10 months I have been working there, the fiber has been cut three
times somewhere and we have had to wait hours for it to be repaired.  Just
today, they started calling me to inform me that the fiber has been cut.
Before today, we would have to report it, then they would confirm what we
already knew.  We were promised 6 months ago by our 'sales engineer' and
salesman that we had redundancy setup on their switches so if another fiber
cut happened, our link would failover to the other side of their statewide
fiber SONET ring.  Well, we had a meeting with our salesman and a new 'sales
engineer' and the new engineer informed us that the failover redundancy was
in fact never configured.

As a residential customer, I had Charter for a couple of years.  My retired
neighbors also had Charter.  I got a call one day from my retired neighbors
asking me if my email was working.  Since I use Gmail, my email was
functional.  I went over to their house and couldn't send any outbound
emails from their computer.  They had called Charter and their tech support
told them to contact Microsoft support since they were using Outlook.  I
went back to my house and couldn't telnet to Charter's smtp server on port
25.  I proceeded to call their tech support to tell them that their smtp
server wasn''t functional, and that was news to them.  The tech didn't even
know their smtp server was down until I told him.  He didn't even seem to
understand what I was talking about.

In my opininion, Charter is very incompetent and they lie to their
customers.  I don't trust that company at all.

Chris

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Timm Murray <tmurray-mlug at wumpus-cave.net>wrote:

> The basic reason why ISPs are going for bandwidth caps and deep packet
> inspection is because they've overcommitted their lines.  In other words,
> they
> promise 10Mb connections to 10 people, but maybe only have 30Mb total to
> serve
> them.  This works well as long as you assume those people are going to
> treat
> their lines like a really fast dial-up connection by just doing a little
> web
> browsing and email.  It all breaks down when people want to do streaming
> video
> and bittorrent seeding.
>
> Overcomitting seems like a bad thing, but realistically, you probably
> wouldn't
> see even 2Mb connections in the US for $40/month without it.
>
> What a business line gets you is that you're no longer overcommitted.  They
> may
> not appreciate all the bittorrent traffic, but they won't stop you, either.
> They also usually offer a 5 address static IP block for a little extra, so
> you
> can host your own server if you like.
>
> I used to be on a Charter Business line, but they didn't increase their
> speeds
> or drop the cost for the three years I had them, until I called them say I
> was
> canceling ("We just got a new rate card yesterday"--yeah, sure you did.)
>
> Now I'm on AT&T business DSL.  Don't have anything to complain about,
> really,
> and you do get free WiFi at any Starbucks along with it.
>
> Jeff Wala wrote:
> > My coop house currently has two 10M lines from Charter going into a load
> > balancing router that serves our LAN. Per a suggestion by Thomas here
> > back in january, I'm looking to switch one of those lines to DSL
> > instead. I'm not sure what advantage two lines from Charter is supposed
> > to give, but it seems having two different providers would make much
> > better use of the load balancing feature.
> >
> > I'd like to know how to make heads or tails of the whole advertised
> > features spiel. Both AT&T and TDS are charging more and promising less
> > for business lines. Does 4M business actually deliver better bandwidth
> > than 6M residential, or are business accounts just about delivering
> > peripheral services and/or large package deals? We would like to set up
> > the account under the house name but residential departments of the
> > providers have been telling me they can't do that.
> >
> > Also, AT&T is quoting more bandwidth for less cost and no contract term
> > as opposed to TDS. Is there anything besides AT&T's pathetic customer
> > service that gives TDS an edge...?
> >
> > ~Jeff
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 06 May 2009 13:25 -0400, Don Seiler <don at seiler.us> wrote:
> >> AT&T has customer service?
> >>
> >> Don.
> >>
> >> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Darrick Hartman
> >> <lugs_darrick at djhsolutions.com> wrote:
> >>> Much of the problems that Charter had in the past have been cleared up.
> What
> >>> you're going to experience is going to depend somewhat by your
> location.
> >>>  Their 10Mb service is supposed to have a 512 upload.  I got closer to
> 1Mb
> >>> up.  I switched to U-verse (AT&T) in January and have enjoyed the
> 18/1.5
> >>> connection, but have not enjoyed their customer service.
> >>>
> >>> Darrick
> >>>
> >>> Douglas A. Whitfield wrote:
> >>>> Also living in Verona, I've had good luck with Charter.  I've never
> >>>> done any benchmarking though.  There are a lot of horror stories with
> >>>> Charter, but Verona isn't part of Madison Charter, it's part of
> >>>> Fitchburg Charter...or at least my part of south Verona right by
> >>>> 18-151 is.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:56 AM, Farhan Ahmad <farhan at thebitguru.com>
> >>>> wrote:
> >>>>> Hi,
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I recently had TDS come and upgrade my connection to 10Mb only to
> find
> >>>>> out
> >>>>> that I could only get 5.2Mb because of the distance from their base
> (in
> >>>>> Verona at the edge of cross country by Epic campus).  I see that
> Charter
> >>>>> has
> >>>>> 10Mb for a few dollars more, but I wanted to see how your experience
> had
> >>>>> been with them.  I realize that the cable internet is generally
> shared by
> >>>>> several nodes and therefore the bandwidth might vary (vs. the always
> >>>>> consistent 5.2Mb that I am getting with TDS).  Other than this, is
> their
> >>>>> service generally consistent?  I like my current service, but would
> like
> >>>>> faster speeds, Charter's 20Mb is very tempting :)  Also, what sorts
> of
> >>>>> upload speed do you get with Charter?
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