 Review by houkouonchi 
UPDATED: 107 days ago
member for 6.1 years, 1903 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Corona,Riverside,CA
 $24 per month
 about 3 days
 "At one point they were good"
 "They over-subscribed too much; too much to list"
 "if its the only thing avaliable then get it; otherwise, go DSL!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Original Entry, 03/2003
well I had adelphia powerlink before hand (3300/128 is what i got) until i decided to move to Corona Valley then I find out the only thing avaliable is charter =(. The install was a bad expirence do to the fact thati lost service 2 hours after the cable installed left, the problem was the model was going through 2 4-way splitters.. i even commented about that saying i didnt think that was good because the signal quality would be severely lowered. i had to redo how the modem was getting cable after i set it up it was going through 1 2 way splitter, getting upstream level of 46 dBmV and downstream level of 1 dBmV. Anyway after i got the service up and going its pretty reliable, i get 1539 kilobits down, thats over a 5 minute period, so i get like 99.8 percent of my advertised speed. Charters routing is much better than adelphias, i can get 14-20ms pings to a lot of southern california servers. ive been ok with there service but id much rather have a faster download/upload, and the only other thing i can complain about is the upload is only 100 kilobits not 128.
update: changed connection reliability from a 4 to a 2 star because the service has been going out at hours of times several times in the last couple weeks, the cable TV goes out too and their technical support is no help
UPDATE: 10/28/2006
Well I decided to try charter again after switching to DSL about 2 years ago for faster speed, charter was 1500/128 dsl was 6016/608, now charter offered 10mb/1mb and I am getting ~10450/999 on speed tests so slightly faster on downstream and upload is spot-on, if their service shows to be reliably fast and reliable I will update again but so far they seem to have come a long way since 3 years ago.
UPDATE: 01/08/2007
Well I am thinking of canceling since speeds go down to 4-5 megabits from 5PM to 1AM or so when I first got it I got great speeds all day, but not anymore.
UPDATE 05/12/2007
Well charter = suck. Sometimes speeds drop to where the upload is higher than the download. Latency/routing sucks. If I didn't have a lot of money I would not keep them. One day when my area had a power outage mys peed went from 1.5 megabits up to 11 during the power outage so it prooves it is just oversubscription as they say nothing is wrong with my line and when everyone is down because of poweroutage my UPS kept me at full speed during peak hours (a first).
Final Update (06/30/2007) (or so I thought!)
Well I finally said screw it and decided to drop Charter. At first I was going to replace it with U-verse until U-verse told me I couldn't keep my DSL. What is sad is it costs about the same amount for 2x 6016/768 DSL lines with the cost of the phone lines for what I was paying for charter. Anyway I am canceling as soon as the DSL gets installed (Ordered it yesterday).
Well the complete and utter final update (7/23/2007):
Well I have long since canceled them and they billed my credit card even after I took off their stupid autopay. I am still waiting to get my money back from them but they are a bunch of crooks who don't know how to run their network.
Update (05/14/2008):
Well charter was running a promotion for $24.95/month for 12 months for 10/1MB which I couldn't pass up. I figured that it would be worth it to at least have a backup connection that uses a completely different technology than my DSL lines and the price was right (used to be $85/month for the same service). Anyway it looks like they either fixed their node saturation issue or just a lot less people have it now due to competition with u-verse as speeds seem pretty consistent throughout the day now. Charter does appear to be throttling bit-torrent traffic now though =(
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