rradina
join:2000-08-08
Chesterfield, MO
| Charter is supposed to offer 10Mbps in our area. I have no idea what that means in terms of true speed. I also don't know what it costs but I'll bet plenty...
I'm not sure what the upload is but it should be 1Mbps.
If they actually deliver it, I don't think Charter is that far behind other cable companies. During the six years I've had Charter, they seem to be one upgrade behind leading-edge cable speeds. (i.e offering 1.5Mbps when 3Mbps was buzzing in other cablelands, offering 3Mbps when everyone else was bumping to 5Mbps and 10Mbps when everyone else is shifting to 15+Mbps.)
However, I must add that after the first couple of years, they have not over subscribed their pipes. I'd rather have consistent 3Mbps service than claimed 10Mbps service that tanks during peak periods.
My experience with Charter has been:
1) Install -- not very good. They really screwed up my first install. A very specific "high speed" guy showed up at my house. He noted corrosion on my line connector and refused to install the cable modem. He scheduled a "line guy" for a different day and then rescheduled another "high speed" guy for yet another day. This adds up when you have to take off work to be home for them. And of course, it's either morning or afternoon. I consistently opted for afternoon so I only had to take a half day off. I feared morning could turn into afternoon and there I'd be having to take a whole day off.
2) Reliability -- not good during the first two years I subscribed to the service. It was always there but in the early days, they went through massive growing pains and during peak hours the service had massive packet loss and very slow speeds. However, after 2002 the reliability and speeds have been excellent. I've also had few outages and cannot complain about the speed at which things get fixed when there is an outage.
3) Price -- average. Without my combined digital MVP package, it's expensive compared to DSL. However, it's my only option so what choice do I have?
Overall, I'm not ready to dump a full load on Charter. I've been fairly happy with their channel offerings, MOXI (DVR) and HSI and overall quality of service. I must agree, however, that the installation process could be smoother. |
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