Review by wingnut28 
Posted: 1.7 years ago
member for 1.8 years, 28 visits, last login: 1.6 years ago
 Ellensburg,Kittitas,WA
 $59 per month (6 month contract)
 about 3 days
 "original install done quickly and expertly"
 "often runs well under 1mbit instead of 10mbit"
 "wish we had competition"
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I have had Charter cable at 3 different locations in the same city over the last 6 years. The 3mbit was always pretty good in the good old days. I had a few problems now and then, but they were often a regional problem and got fixed.
A year ago the 3mbit went to 5mbit at no additional charge, and was faster. I don't ever expect to get anywhere near the rated speed, but do once in a while. Most of the servers out there aren't designed to pump out a steady 10mbit all day so I am happy with 60% throughput on average.
Six months ago I moved and got another new installation. The install tech was good, fast, and installed cable tv outlets just like I wanted and we got a pretty fair connection. On a 6 month introductory offer I went ahead and got the 10mbit/1mbit service. A few months ago it went really slow for almost a month, then finally went back to a reasonable speed. Tech support was pretty clueless, and even after the 4th or 5th call they would insist I reboot, power off, etc. I finally gave up and it came back faster after a few weeks. Then at the start of the year it went back to its old tricks, and went slow to very slow. After lots of calls, they decided it was just the internet that was slow.
I have made maybe 25 calls over the last 3 months, and never got any solution or any good answer. Sometimes the admit to having a fair number of router problems around the country, but NEVER in my area. One day while getting about one mbit in a specific test, I got the local technician to run the same test and he got about 2mbits, much better than me but well below what I thought I should be getting.
I guess you all heard about the internet coming to a stop this month, right?  Right now I can get some benchmarks to run in the 2mbit range but it is 3am pacific time. Earlier I was getting much slower. I have tun many benchmarks on many different systems, and am used to getting like 3-5mbits in prime time to some of them, and 6-7mbits late at night, but am getting like half a mbit or less during prime evening time. It is clearly not my local hardware or software because I can get high speeds to a few servers that are close to me. But when I go to big names like apple, yahoo, msn, etc. I get really bad speeds.
I suspect that it is packet loss and flow control in the Charter network. I can't get a ping from most of the routers, but a tracert often shows a fairly slow response on the second or third jump. I can't tell if packet losses are in the charter network or further upstream, but I suspect it is in the charter network. They won't admit to anything, though, and it is very hard to get to talk to any support beyond the first level (which is often a voice recognition program.) Since they upgraded everyone from 3 to 5mbit for free and started offering 10mbit, you would assume they had built up their network to support this but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Meanwhile, the great introductory prices go away after 6 months and the costs go up so much for cable tv that my wife said we are going to satellite before we will pay their full rate. However, with no alternative for internet access, I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. I would pay the same for a reliable 3mbit DSL link but locally the highest DSL speed is more expensive, limited to 1.5mbit, and requires paying for the phone line (My family just all use a cell phone.)
When phone, tv and internet costs $200-$250 a month, what is the average person going to do? Neat new services like movie downloading need a few mbits a second at a minimum. It looks like some of us are just going to be frozen out. If you can't get access to to a reasonable speed of internet for a fair price, how are all the lower income people going to keep up?
I would expect any big internet provider to have some good diagnostics that they or I could run to pinpoint the problem. They can remotely check some things on the cable modem, and have always told me everything looked really good at that point. If the problem really is outside the Charter network, you would think word would get out that a major backbone had a problem. Thus I suspect Charter is at fault.
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