Posted: 9/29/2005 7:05:08 AM EDT
| I don't know how they perform in other areas, but Charter Media in my part of TN is the most inept group I have ever done business with. I have had their service for broadband for about 4 months now and I have had techs out at my house no less than 5 times already to try and stabilize my internet connection. The problem is still not fixed, it will just randomly drop off for 5-20 minutes and the speed fluctuates like crazy. I just moved from East TN where I had Comcast and I never had a problem with service there. I can't wait to move after school so I can send them a nice "You're fired" letter. |
|
We have Charter locally. What amazes me is that they will destroy neighborhoods to replace the cable with one that's a little better than the RG-6 they used to use, but they won't replace the equipment. It's much cheaper to try another cable box, cable modem, or replace a splitter than it is to dig-up the front and/or backyards and streets in neighborhoods from their amplifier to the house. For our office when they couldn't get their digital channels to work, they dug-up a city street, a sidewalk, our parking-lot, and the yards in front of four houses. It still didn't work, so after a couple of months going back and forth I finally was able to talk them out of another box. The new box fixed the problem. They could have fixed the problem for the price of the box plus 30 seconds of their time. Instead, there's no telling what they spent on days worth of digging and laying new cable. At my nephew's house, they pulled-up the fences behind 13 houses and messed-up two swimming pools to get his cable modem to work. Before they did this, I got his modem to work by running new RG-6 between their splitter in his backyard and trying a different brand cable modem. They could have gotten it to work by replacing a 20' underground run and a cable modem. Instead, they had 4+ guys digging with equipment for almost a week and made 14 total home owners very mad. I don't know how much they spent total, but my nephew's pool after they collapsed in the sidewall and ripped the liner was over $5k to fix and his neighbor's septic tank cost almost $7k to replace after they drove their heavy bulldozers back and forth over the drain tiles. A friend that is in that business estimated Charter wasted $30,000 to get that cable modem to work. At $40/month, it will take them, assuming no other costs, 62.5 years to recover that cost. Inept doesn't even begin to describe them.z ETA: I forgot to also mention that Charter did the work while the remains of a tropical storm were over the area. They turned a lot of grass in yards into mud with their equipment. The ruts in my nephew's yard were over a feet deep. They also ruined two outbuildings with their equipment. You have to be pretty inept with a backhoe or with a dump truck to demolish a building by accident. The one I saw was a complete loss. Since Charter went in and started knocking down fences without talking to anyone, several dogs got loose. Three kids were bitten, and IIRC two animals were put to sleep because of that and in addition several dogs were never found. |
Exactly. They also have the right to get to their equipment so they didn't have to pay for the damage to the yards or for letting the dogs loose. This also meant that the court found that they weren't liable for the actions of the dogs after their employees let them out since they had to remove fencing to get to their cable with their equipment. Charter paid for the damage to the septic tank and to the pools. My nephew didn't have any trouble collecting for the damage to his pool since Charter admitted that the pool was more than 10' from their main cable and they could have easily routed the cable around the pool to get from their main cable to the house rather than digging with a backhoe (they didn't use a trencher for any of this!) along the edge of the pool. They didn't pay a penny for the buildings since they were too close to their right of way, for the fences since they were directly on top of their buried cable, or for the grass they damaged getting to/from their cable. I understand why they must be allowed to get to and replace their cabling and equipment, but they stretched that right to ridiculous limits.z |
|
We had COX out of Baton Rouge after the storm since Charter was down (they put thrm on charter lines). They had better channels and some extras Charter took away a long time ago. So I figured, since we went a week without Charter before they put Cox on, screw 'em. I was gonna go Direct TV. I went to Charter and asked how much for just Internet(take off my expanded basic) and the drone said 65 bucks!! I only pay 69 now. She said it was a 20 buck "penalty" for not having cable with the internet. And there'e nothing I can do..I have to have my high speed internet. There service is clueless, last time they said to call Dell to fix my problem......I hung up anf the next morning it was OK. I get pissed thinking about it. Every few years they re-negotiate to keep the area...I don't know who they're paying off. |
|
Update on another Charter story. The owner of my company I work for has a cable modem at his house that hasn't worked in almost 12 weeks, so he asked me to look at it. Charter has scheduled six appointments that they've missed, so he asked me to just swap-out the modem for him. He's leasing it, so I thought that would be easy. It took me over 2 hours on Friday at their office to get it done. Last night when I tried it, it still didn't work and the guy on the 1-800 # said the MAC address hadn't been setup yet. The idiot at the counter yesterday forgot to type it in. After that was done, it still didn't work. Today I spent five hours at his house talking to one Charter moron after another. I finally found someone with a clue. He said the signal strength had to be at least -13 dBmV for the cable modem to work. The voltage at his cable modem was 1/50 what it should be. This is a two year-old house with top quality wiring in the neighborhood (done by professionals rather than Charter) with less than two year-old amplifiers. It's 1/50 of the voltage required! Charter is refusing to fix it so far. We work with the county administrator's office (they manage Charter's government-granted monopoly here) so you'd think we could get something done, but one of the guys I talked to there tonight said they can't do anything about any problems other than basic service and use of right of ways. In the past, the receiptionist there has said 95+% of the calls they receive are complaints about Charter, but they can't do anything about the vast majority of them. Having them help is a no-go. As an aside: the local morons at Charter decided to put the three major networks on the same cable channel as they each broadcast. They put the three networks on the channels that have the most interference! Now most people in town have a fuzzy picture on the three networks at best, or like my boss, can't get them at all. I don't own a TV, so I didn't realize how bad it was. Charter has really screwed-over the people around here. PBIR, your connection with Charter work yet?z |
nope they suck in MN too. I was so happy when I dropped those bastards. They are also in financial trouble so don't expect any upgrades soon. |