Review by matt314159 
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 2.7 years, 273 visits, last login: 9 days ago
 Hesperia,San Bernardino,CA
 $20 per month
 about 7 days
 "Most of the time, "It Just Works""
 "When it doesnt, good luck getting somebody with a triple digit IQ to help you out."
 "Explore your options. Sometimes Charter is the best value, sometimes it's not"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I'm my family's designated liaison with Charter. I've got five different households (grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles) in my family that all use charter. When something goes wrong, i am the first one they call. I then go to their house and deal with charter on their behalf.
My biggest beef is the offshore tech support. No matter the issue, they will always step you through their prewritten script, with NO CONCEPT of what is actually going on at all, and no attempt to actually wrap their minds around the situation. Once I can bully through the 1st tier tech support and get somebody who 1) speaks English and more importantly 2) knows what they're talking about, I usually get results pretty quick.
Charter's "regular" pricing is atrocious. Their promotional prices are starting to get shorter lately, offering 3 to 6 months of the promotional rate instead of 12 like they used to.
At my house, we have options. Verizon 3mb/768k DSL is available for $29 a month, and Dish Network is always a thorn in a cableco's side, so I use this to my advantage. If you know how to work the system, you can strongarm them into giving you decent rates. But you have to be willing to walk when you call their retention department. My latest achievement was getting 3mb HSI for $19.99 for 12 months. It happened because I was ready to walk away for good. I had Verizon install DSL at our house (we had 30 days to "test drive" it before we got locked in a contract) and I was pleased, so I called charter to cancel. They offered me some half-hearted 3 and 6 month deals, and when I was adamant that I wanted to cancel, because I had found it cheaper elsewhere, they finally relented and gave me the $19 rate for 12 months. So I actually sent my DSL modem back to Verizon and canceled Verizon instead of charter. Lucky for me, just a couple weeks later, every southern California customer (that I know of) who had 3mb cable internet through charter, was put on a special "5meg preview" tier, which is good through February 2008. So for the last 6 months, I've had 5mb internet for $19.99/month. And I'll gladly ride that wave into '08.
Last night our cable modem got knocked offline, and through talking to my family members who also have charter, discovered that it was an area-wide outage. The modem knocked off around 11pm,and when I got up this morning at 6am, it was all back and running normally again. This was, however, the first time in OVER A YEAR, that we had had an outage like this.
Bottom line: Shop around, and play the companies against each other. If charter wins pricewise, go with them. If not, I'd recommend whatever the other alternative is, because Charter is definitely NOT worth any kind of a premium price.
Followup comments:  KoRnGtL15
Premium
join:2007-01-04
Grants Pass, OR | ? Whats your complaint? The pricing. Ok whatever. Go wheel and deal to get the better price. But 1 outage in a year and your complaining? | |
| matt314159
join:2006-01-18
Hesperia, CA
 ·Charter Pipeline
edit:
September 23rd, @02:39AM
| Just because it works doesnt mean it's a great company Tech support is my biggest complaint with them. Just because there's no outage does not mean I don't have a reason to complain.
Say, for instance, the time I bought my grandmother a surfboard 5100 so she could quit paying her modem rental fee. Called and got the modem put on the account, only turns out they didn't take off the other modem, nor did they mark the one I swapped onto the account as my own, even though I specifically told them, I was swapping out the leased modem with a modem i bought with my own money. I had to bang supervisor's heads together to get them to understand that I was not going to pay them $3 a month to use a modem that WE OWNED. Stuff like that.
We've had some billing issues as well, that were a hassle.
Overall, charter really isn't that great of a company, though in our area of southern California, there are relatively few technical problems (Thank God I don't live in riverside). So like I said, Charter isn't my first choice of a company, but its livable. The service works, but the support structure (by that I mean the CSR's, Tech agents, etcetera) is subpar. | |
| KoRnGtL15
Premium
join:2007-01-04
Grants Pass, OR
| ........ I agree with what you say about the support and what not. They pulled the same thing on me with the modem deal. Ive had my own since day 1. And since the bill is just paid. I got to looking and they charged $3 extra bucks each month. This was 11 months worth. I called customer service and there was no hassle with credit being credited to the account. My only choice for service out here is Charter and Qwest. Qwest only offers 1.5 mb dsl service. Way to slow. Charter offers 3mb, 5mb and 10mb. Im on there 3mb plan but with a 5mb preview until Feb 2008. Its $29.99 right now and in Feb im staying on the 5mb plan. Which jumps it up to $39.99. While pricey. I simply dont have any other choices in my area for service. Which really stinks. Service has been pretty reliable. | |
|  | matt314159
join:2006-01-18
Hesperia, CA | Re: ........ You listed the only company I've heard that most people agree is actually WORSE than charter, and that's QWEST. I've heard nothing but horror stories about that company. You definitely made the right choice in sticking with charter. | |
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