Well, its time to air my grievances somewhere because calling the service department at Charter is worthless. Charter runs a nice little monopoly here in Rochester so when it comes to cable service they have us cornered. I was getting frustrated so I decided to do a little Google'ing to see what I could find. I typed in 'Charter internet great'. Guess what the first 10 hits were? That's right, charter.com. So then I typed in 'Charter internet sucks'. The results were much different as you might imagine. On the one hand I was comforted that I was not the only one suffering as I spent the next 30 mins reading about other people experiencing the same piss-poor service. On the other hand though, its sad that a business that is this horrendous can stay in business. I am yet to find a single website that has a customer praising the quality of their service.
Here are just a few of the things I've run into:
1. Incorrect Billing - About six months ago we got a letter in the mail saying that Charter was changing their service plans and that we would be forced to "upgrade." Unless we called to change our service our bill was going up $20/month for our package which included digital cable and the slowest internet service. We couldn't afford to pay over $1oo/month so I called them up and asked to drop to basic cable. I had a coupon for the 3Meg High Speed Internet so I signed up for that too. Lo and behold, next month my bill comes and I'm charged twice for the internet service (neither price included the coupon) and I was being charged for two digital tiers (movies and sports) even though we no longer had digital cable. It sounds like I'm one of the lucky ones, but after only the 2nd call to customer service I was able to get my bill fixed.
2. Poor Internet Service - Wow, this has been so bad it makes me want to cry when I think about it. For the past 18 months we have had to deal with our internet connection being dropped repeatedly. It depended on how much we were online, but if I were working from home for the day I could expect it to drop the connection atleast twice. The only way to get it back was to shut down the computer and power cycle the cable modem. On top of that, I'm not getting anywhere close to the service I'm paying for. I've been monitoring my download speed for the past month and the most I've been able to get is 400kb/s. That's not too bad, unless you consider that I'm paying for 3000kb/s! So I'm maxing out at about 13% of what I'm paying for.
3. Charter Phone Service - I don't have Charter phone myself, but have been watching a co-worker deal with this one for the past week. His wife tried changing service from Qwest to Charter a few weeks ago. When he found out he immediately had her change it back, but it was too late. Charter hadn't activated their service yet, but had taken control of their number. So they were left without a working phone in their home. When he tried calling up Qwest to get that service back they couldn't do it because Charter owned their number and wouldn't give it up for 9 days (a.k.a. a cheap way to get people who want to keep their old number to use your service even if they don't want to). I guess over the weekend they went ahead and had Charter turn their phone on with the intent that after 9 days they'll switch back to Qwest. But here's the kicker, he can't call the Qwest 1-800 number from his home phone!!! He can reach it from work, but not from his home phone with Charter service. And you are telling me this is legal?
Again, I don't know how these morons can stay in business. There is absolutely no accountability, honesty, or integrity in anything that they do. I can promise you that if there were a competing company in Rochester (Hello Comcast, if you're out there, we are waiting) atleast 80% of Charter's current customers would switch.
Here are a few other rabid people across the country that I found hate Charter:
http://www.topix.net/forum/com/chtr
http://www.rateitall.com/i-280152-charter-cable-tv.aspx
http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=16573
http://www.my3cents.com/showReview.cgi?id=16334
http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/show.dml/61589
http://solo2.org/blogs/christoc/archive/tags/Charter+Sucks/default.aspx
http://chrishammond.com/blogs/archive/2006/08/15/Charter-Sucks.aspx
At this point I don't even know what to do but bend over and grab my ankles. The future looks bleak.
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