Review by Ahuacamolli 
member for 11.4 years, 127 visits, last login: 37 days ago
updated 202 days ago
 Riverside,Riverside,CA
 $57 per month- (month by month)
 "I'm not stuck with a long term contract." "Service is far from optimal or acceptable" "Unfortunately, Charter is my only realistic choice for cable television and internet service."
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I live in Riverside, California and believe that Charter's services are the best they've ever been. But that doesn't mean their services are reliable. Far from it.
My digital/HD cable television service is fraught with frequent services anomalies and disruptions. It's rare that I can watch any broadcast that isn't interrupted or affected by pixelations or complete disruptions.
My High Speed, 30Mbps internet service is for the most part reliable, and my average sustained download throughput hovers around 21Mbps. However, it's useless for streaming video from Netflix, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon, and Hulu, as the stream is frequently disrupted by buffering, and pixelation. The running of trace routes from my Windows 7 computer discloses the the source of the majority of the problems are likely due to frequent packet loss occurring at the first two "hops" away from my internet modem.
Charter has sent technicians to my home on five occasions during just the past 12 months. The cabling between my televisions and cable modem has been completely replaced - twice. Adjustments and maintenance of an unknown nature has reportedly been performed in my neighborhood and each Charter tech then says that things are as they should be. But when the problems occur again, the next Charter tech that pays a visit finds that there are problems affecting my neighborhood and tells me that he's informed Charter maintenance.
Comments:
 | | Line issue? What does Charter's Pipeline service entail? I've got their regular cable modem service in the Lake Arrowhead area and regularly test over my speed at any time of the day. Have you checked inside wiring or from the pole to your house as the issue? I had to have Charter come out and fix the drop to my house as it was almost completely worn through, completely fixed any problems I had. | |
|  | | | Re: Line issue? Quick reply to my own post, but it seems Charter Pipeline is a hybrid cable modem service, one-way download (from cable plant to user) and using dial-up for upload. I feel like this hasn't been used in years and I'm not sure of the validity of this report. | |
| | | | | Re: Line issue? Looks to me like this report is probably about 10 years old. | |
| | | | | | Re: Line issue? If he was getting 30Mbps ten years ago, that was pretty amazing.  | |
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rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO | Make Sure it isn't Your Stuff Connect just your cable modem to the main wire coming in the house (no splitters). Does this improve anything? Do the same for one of your digital TVs/converter boxes. Does this improve the video quality?
Access your modem's status page and note your downstream and upstream signals. It could be that one or both are not what they should be despite the cable technicians claiming they are OK.
Take note of the signals when the modem is the only thing on your inside wiring without any splitters and when it's wired as it is normally. Are there significant differences?
Regarding pixelization, do you have any open taps in your house? If so, can you disconnect the unused runs from the used runs? If not, buy some metal coax caps to prevent exterior signals leaking into your home's wiring (ingress). If you can remove unused runs, don't forget to cap off the unused taps on splitters that now have empty taps. If you've removed unused runs, can you eliminate any splitters?
If there's a significant performance difference between everything hooked to the coax vs. the cable modem being the only thing, consider a bi-directional signal amp. Get a good one and then buy a good single splitter that provides enough ports for all your needs. This will get rid of splitters on splitters and potentially solve some of the pixelization and packet loss problems.
Of course you could do all this and not see much or any improvement if there's some chronic problem with Charter's system in your area. That would be unfortunate but hopefully they will fix it.
One last thing about packet loss. This is experienced over a wired Ethernet connection correct? If you are using WiFi, you could have interference in your area -- even if the signal strength is good/excellent. In my house I have dual band router in the basement. Although I have to use 2.4Ghz on the second floor (5Ghz doesn't penetrate well), there are times when the 2.4Ghz band is getting thumped by competing microwave ovens, Bluetooth devices and 2.4Ghz phones. Despite a strong signal, I still get packet loss and lower speeds. If I'm on the first floor, I flip my laptop to the 5Ghz band and all the problems vanish. | |
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