Review by Gerdofal 
UPDATED: 288 days ago
member for 5.6 years, 83 visits, last login: 89 days ago
 Pasadena,Los Angeles,CA
 $70 per month
 about 60 days
 "IF you get it working, it tends to work well"
 "Their support has gone down hill since they made the local office unreachable... takes forever to get it working."
 "Pasadena area lines are old and have problems. Expect trouble getting it working."
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
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(ratings below consensus)
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Charter cable service can be very reliable, once you get it working. Due to the old lines and equipment in many locations, you should expect that it won't work well when originally installed. Remember, the installation man or woman is not really a tech... they can't fix anything.
You'll need to call technical support (and go through their many steps of procedures, and then convince then that your computer isn't faulty and doesn't need to be returned to the manufacturer) before you will ever get a real tech call. Once you get a real tech to visit, they maybe can find and fix the problem. Sometimes it is crossed wires in your location, other times its a box down the street. Problem is, it's all invisible to the customer... there is no way to get an update on the maintenance requests.
A word about Charter technical support. Like many companies, they contract with a group overseas (India I think). Their step by step procedure doesn't really allow them to find fault with their cable. The final steps of their procedure is based on old operating systems and will invariably cause the tech to say your computer is faulty if you're using Windows Vista. But, if you can convince them otherwise, you can get them to schedule a tech call. Good luck!
UPDATE 2-19-09
Their customer service remains horrible... but they finally got my connection to not drop every 15 minutes (I was running about 70% uptime, with max time of about 25 min). A new modem fixed it...but I had to practically insist for them to replace the old one. (The first tech wouldn't replace the modem...but the second finally did. The second actually realized part of the problem too... the power supply they had installed with the old modem was the wrong one.)
So now they have DNS problems in my area, and my bandwidth goes down during peak time, and they have instituted caps. (How does 100GB cap make sense when a game download can be 10+GB?)
Followup comments:  NorCal John
join:2006-02-18
Crescent City, CA | charter I use OpenDNS instead of charter's DNS.
Try it. | |
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