| reply to bruintennis
Re: Charter or U-Verse Internet?? Thinking of switching soon. I've been a Uverse subscriber since 2010. Full boat..U450 TV package, 2 phone lines and highest speed tier they offered. I just relocated to an area that isn't served by Uverse and so switched to Charter. The tiers don't exactly match up, but I did get the current "Gold" package offered...30 HSI, 1 phone line and highest TV tier offered.
Most notable comparisons to me between the two:
TV:
Picture quality is similar, although for high-speed action flicks or movies with a lot of dark tones, Charter looks better in HD. I don't like the "delay" Charter boxes go thru when switching between resolution modes...not sure what is up with that. Wasn't ever an issue with Uverse. And the Guide and channel layout on the Charter boxes is soooo 1990 looking. I really enjoyed Uverse's on-screen display feature set. Charter really needs to upgrade in that regards. I am REALLY missing the whole-house DVR feature of Uverse. I did buy DVR's for all my STB's which helps a bit (and is nice in some ways....kids stuff stays on kids TV, etc.). But I have already found myself wishing I could watch a show recorded on one DVR on a different TV set. I also miss all the little iPhone apps that would let me take TV shows with me and/or control my DVR when away from home. Haven't found a Charter equivalent to that yet. But overall, I can live with Charter's lower-tech status as the TV picture is really pretty good in HD. Uverse also suffered sporadic digital fractures where you'd have a full day of the sound cutting out every 30 seconds, or a night when the picture would freeze every few minutes. There was never any rhyme or reason for this. So far, Charter is binary...it either works as intended, or its out completely. Fortunately, only one minor (5 minute) outtage thus far.
Phone:
Charter actually sounds far, far better than Uverse ever did. I had a lot of Uverse issues with the phone quality...static, bleed-thru from the residential gateway device, etc. Again, I miss the Uverse digital extension app that would let you know when you had voice mail on your home line via the iPhone app. But honestly, I was about to abandon my home phone line completely with Uverse since it was swamped with telemarketers anyways so....its a toss up. Charter was so cheap to get a phone line I just opted to keep it as part of the bundle.
Internet:
Since I'm on the 30 package with Charter, it is similar in speed to Uverse' top speed tier. My biggest finding thus far is that Charter is again a bit more binary here. Either you get the top speeds or you don't. Uverse would always work, but my speeds were all over the place. Sometimes I'd get all the bandwidth I was paying for, and lots of other times, I'd get half of that or less. Charter is either all on or all off. The bigger difference to me is more of a hardware thing. With Uverse, you had to use their Residential Gateway router. You could hook up your own wifi AP to it, but there were some settings that were defaulted on the RG that you just had to live with. I enjoy being able to hook up my own AP to the Charter modem and set things up the way I want. But generally....its a wash otherwise. I'd obviously feel different if I was on the 100 tier package.
Price:
I was way, way off-contract with Uverse. But my monthly bill was almost $300/month with the two phone lines, U450 and HSI. I tweaked it down in the past couple months of using them (eliminated both phone lines and dropped to a 12 HSI package) but my bill still sat at around $160/month. With Charter, I'm at $170/month WITH phone service AND faster HSI. So I think I'm coming out ahead in terms of raw content/service per dollar. But I do miss the polish of Uverse. It was pretty slick. |
