Review by goillini 
UPDATED: 340 days ago
member for 3.5 years, 932 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Madison,Dane,WI
 Contract price not specified.
 "speed, when it works"
 "reliability, customer support (or lack thereof), price"
 "Too unreliable"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Review re-written 12-23-2008
Internet:
We previously had both AT&T DSL and Charter internet at home. After a year of trying to make the Charter internet service work, I finally dropped them this month when we got hooked up with AT&T Uverse's Max 18 DSL package.
We had signed up for Charter's internet service because my wife needed a dedicated connection for a hardware VPN she uses to work from home, and Charter's 10/1 Mbps service was the fastest option at the time.
Self-install was easy, and the cable modem worked well for the first few months we had it. However, this summer (2008), the cable modem service began to have serious reliability issues. It wasn't a connection issue on our cable modem -- it still showed a connection, and we could ping the first hop in a traceroute to remote hosts. Somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd hop, we would intermittently have huge packet loss rates that would drop the VPN connection. It started happening several times a day for over 30 minutes at a time. It just got to the point it was so unreliable, she found a work-around that did not require a hardware VPN and just stuck with our AT&T DSL connection, which has been rock-solid.
The reliability issue isn't just at my house -- I asked around at work and *everyone* who has had Charter Internet reported the same problem and all of them switched to another ISP (either TDS or AT&T).
Speedtest to Charter's local speedtest server showed 7.5 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up (so only 75% of the advertised download speed, and that was during the middle of the day). Speedtest off Charter's network to Chicago shows 6 Mbps down, 870 Kbps up, which was faster than our AT&T DSL, but we recently signed up for AT&T Uverse Max 18 (18 Mbps down / 1.5 up) and are seeing the full 18 Mbps pipe.
Cable TV:
TV service was poor (lots of problems with digital channels) for a long time. Going through their phone menu takes forever and their support was not very helpful. Luckily, we finally had some ice break off our roof last winter (early 2008) and destroy the splitter for the house. Charter came out and replaced the splitter with a new enclosed box and ran a new line to the pole, and we're now able to reliably watch digital channels.
But the VOD service was useless -- it's way oversubscribed in Madison, so 9 times out of 10 when you go to watch one of the 'free' HBO/Starz on-demand movies ('free' = comes with your HBO subscription), you get an error message that the service is temporarily unavailable and to try again later. Even better would be when you'd start a movie and pause it to use the bathroom, and got the 'try again later' message when trying to resume the movie.
The HD lineup is pathetic, and Charter always, ALWAYS screws up and blacks out Cubs games on ESPN that should not be blacked out in Madison. Whoever manages the local headend has no clue what they're doing. The Big Ten Network HD channel ran in standard def for weeks before they finally fixed it. It's like even their own employees can't stand watching Charter cable, otherwise you'd think they'd notice (and fix) these problems sooner.
If we could get DirecTV or Dish, we would, but we have too many trees. We recently signed up for AT&T Uverse TV and might keep it in place of Charter TV.
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