Review by cabbey 
member for 7.5 years, 171 visits, last login: 2.7 years ago
lodged 2.7 years ago
 Rochester,Olmsted,MN
 Business customer $99 per month- (24 month contract)
 about 1 days "business class connection with business class support" "no communications about planned outages/maintenance" "not the worst monopoly in the world"
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(ratings match consensus)
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NOTE: While this says "Charter Pipeline" above this is really a review of "Charter Business Networks"... they're the same physical infrastructure, same billing, same network. My connection is actually at a residential location in the SW of town (inside the city limits).
Sadly there are no comparable broadband offerings available in my area. DSL speeds are a joke, and they clearly know it... hardly even try to market it, if you push them for a plan they're pretty cheap, because even the fastest they can accomplish around here is laughably slow when compared to cable.
When I originally migrated from a charter connection through my former employer to my own CBN connection I signed a 2 year contract for 10/1 service for $100/mon. At the time, that was faster than any publicly available plan on pipeline, which at the time was I think 8m/512k. The contract said I was locked into that speed, but they've actually kept me locked into that "tier" if you will, so as they have cranked up the speeds on pipeline, my speeds have gone up as well. I'm currently sitting at 20/2 for the same price.
That connection is almost always able to be fully saturated. I can get my rated speed not only to things here in town on their network, but also clear across the country to our datacenter 85ms away... this is truly noticeable when I have to download a several hundred meg data file for testing or a new SDK for development.
The setup fee was a bit of a sore spot. It was $100. For the "installer" to come in, read the RF MAC off the bottom of the modem, call in and request that it be deactivated from account 1 and the activated on account 2. That was it, a 5 minute phone call. They already knew the RFMAC on the modem, it was attached to my old account that they copied into my new CBN account. The installer and I had a good laugh over it, easiest job he had ever had.
I have one huge (for me) problem with them though. There is absolutely no communications on their planned outages for maintenance. The problem here is that I work from home doing web development. Their maintenance window happens to align with the maintenance window on our servers at work. So on several occasions now we've pushed out new code to our servers and right in the middle of testing it, or worse in the middle of fixing something, I'll get dropped off line. Calls to the support number find out that they've put my node, or the entire city, into maintenance and will be out for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. I've tried all kinds of paths to get official notice, even if it's just the day of, that they will be using their standing maintenance window, but everyone says "yeah, sorry there's no way to do that." The best I've come up with is a tech here on bbr that has told me that yes, their maintenance window is friday morning at just past midnight. (which exactly lines up with ours at work.) As a result of this, my employer is now spending an additional $50/mon (roughly) for me to have a backup connection via Verizon mifi. It's painfully slow, but faced with no connection at all, it's already been a life saver.
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