In this day and age of corporate incompetence and malfeasance, Charter Communications somehow manages to sink lower than
all the rest. Quite a feat.
There are really three tales to be told here, so feel free to skip to the particular ugliness that is of interest to you. It starts with their poor Internet service, which is a good lesson in "caveat emptor", as what you are being sold is not necessarily what you are getting. If that's what you're interested in, click
here. From there it goes to tech support which at best is totally incompetent, and at worst downright dishonest. If that's what you want to read about, click
here. And then finally it ends with a customer help/billing department which is downright fraudulent. To skip to that bit of nastiness, click
here. But if you want to just read the whole story, be my guest and continue on......
Oversubscribed
Internet Service
The story begins late last year (2005) when I started to notice that my connection speed seemed to be getting slower and slower, particularly in the evenings. So I decided to set up some scheduled FTP downloads and track them over time to see if this was just my imagination or if there was indeed a problem in the evenings. And sure enough,
as I suspected there was a very significant performance hit in the evenings. Now I happened to also have a DSL connection, which I used strictly for backup (at a rate of under $20/month, why not?) -- so I was able to run side-by-side comparisons, downloading the exact same file from the same FTP site. Here's what the results looked like:
Now there are a lot of interesting things about this graph -- like the fact that even though my cable connection supposedly ran at 3Mbps, even at best I was getting far less than that. And ditto for the DSL, which in theory was supposed to run at 1.5Mbps. This is a somewhat complicated and interesting issue in and of itself -- what it basically boils down to is that for any type of internet connection, the "rated" speed is typically a speed you can only achieve via speed tests that are optimized in such a way as to give you your maximum possible speed. Tests which rarely, if ever, even come close to real world conditions that you will encounter while browsing web sites or doing file downloads. And that's why the speeds reflected above aren't anywhere close to what you might expect -- as these tests were done in a real world environment with a commercial FTP server, like you would normally encounter in using the internet.
But all of that is beside the point here -- what I was experiencing in the evening with my cable connection. And the graph clearly shows that the performance of the cable connection slowly went downhill over the course of the day. In fact, it's so intuitively obvious what is going on that anyone can see it. The connection runs fine until about 3:00 in the afternoon when kids start getting out of school, coming home, and logging on to the internet. Once that process starts, the node that I connect to starts getting overloaded as I'm now sharing the available bandwidth with more users -- and so my performance starts going
downhill. And you can watch it slowly degrade through the evening. At 5:00 people are now getting off work, coming home and logging on and things continue to slow down. And by 10:00pm things pretty much bottom out with everyone pounding away at their keyboards. But around 11:00 you see
people starting to retire for the night, and the speed quickly returns to what is was earlier in the day. By 1:00am, everything is back to normal.
So, armed with this data I posted a note on the regional Help BB (which I should mention is an extremely good resource -- the admin that runs the board is very knowledgeable, goes to great lengths to help users, and is very above board and honest. It truly is a shame he's associated with such a
slime ball company). After some back-and-forth there, the administrator checked with the local techs and sure enough
their answer was that the circuit in my area needed upgrading and that they were in
the process of doing just that, but with no timetable available. Fair enough --
an honest answer to an obvious problem. I can live with that.
However, as time went by, the service continued to get worse and worse -- at points
I would lose all connectivity for brief periods of time. So I decided to call
the 800 tech support number and see if I could get any information about when I might expect the problem to be solved. And that's where things started going downhill.
The Lying Liars of Tech
Support
I can certainly understand temporary growth problems where you
inadvertently oversell the service in a particular area. No big deal. As long as you're upfront about what's going on, and working on resolving the problem I'll stick it out. So after a month or so of continually
degraded service I finally decided to call tech support and just get a status report on when we might expect some relief. And that's where I ran in to a steady stream of total lies. First tech I talked to absolutely denied that there was any kind of capacity issue in my area, that there had to be some other type of problem. I told him I didn't see how that was possible, given the overwhelming evidence -- but what the heck, at that point I figured I might as well work with them. So he told me to call back during one of the periods where I was experiencing slow downs and they would work with me to resolve the problem. And from that point on it was just one runaround after another. Run diagnostics, try this, try that, nothing helped. Of course, since it was clearly a capacity issue that had nothing to do with my particular setup. At one point I had a tech assure me that all they had to do is reset my connection at their end, and that would fix everything. Now they're really starting to insult my intelligence.
Finally, they decide to actually send a tech out to work on the problem at my place. He shows up, runs some diagnostics, assures me he knows what the problem is, and then goes out back to somehow "adjust the signal at the pole" or
some such nonsense. Once he's done, he tells me that when he ran
his diagnostics he was getting a lot of packet loss, and that was the problem, and now it's solved. Well, I know that is a total crock -- the problem never was packet loss, even during the peak periods. And I knew damned well that during the middle of the day there sure wasn't any packet loss. This guy was lying to me -- he knew it and I knew it.
So that was the last straw. Like I said, if I had just had some assurance that they were aware of the problem and working on it, I wouldn't have even considered dropping the service. But instead, they led me on for a couple of months, with nothing but one lie after another, hoping that at some point I would buy in to their crap and somehow think the problem was fixed. Or maybe just give up, and continue to pay them cable rates for sub-DSL performance. Sorry, but I'm not that big of fool. I
decided to cancel the service, and live with the DSL as being my only internet connection.
After all, in the evenings it was running pretty much at the same
speed as the cable -- and at less than half the cost.
Billing Fraud
Then the real fun began. Even though I had cancelled the internet
part of the service, I continued to use the cable TV service, which
was never great but at least acceptable. The first bill I got after I cancelled the internet service
thus still included the monthly charge for the cable TV (which was
correct), but also included was a $33 charge for "unreturned equipment". I'm
thinking that has to be in reference to the cable modem which I had originally rented from Charter when I first got the service, but which I
had returned four years ago. So clearly this is a simple billing error that can easily be
remedied. Right there on the monthly statement is a number to call for billing questions, so I figure this should be easy to
fix. I could not have been more wrong. The representative that I spoke with was extremely rude -- refusing not only to help fix the problem, but telling me that
I would have to call the local Charter office. And then she refused to give me that number! I checked the Charter web site to find a local phone number, couldn't find one, so decided to simply write them a letter instead. At this point I was sensing that Charter was up to no good, so I wanted to document everything in
writing anyway.
I never heard back from that letter, and sure enough the next statement still had the erroneous charge on it. I wrote yet another letter and included it with the bill this time, figuring surely someone would now read it and correct the situation. Nope, wasn't going to happen. Next month's statement not only still included the erroneous charge, but now they are charging me a late fee as well since I haven't been paying what they were claiming was the amount due. I'm fed up at this point, so I just write a note on the bill saying that it's erroneous, and include a check for what should have been the correct amount due.
Next thing I know I'm getting recorded messages left on my answering machine to please call Charter about a billing issue. OK, forever the optimist, I figure they finally got around to processing one of my letters, and that's what the call is about, and so we'll finally get this thing resolved. Nope, wasn't going to happen. Turns out all they wanted to do is inform me that if I didn't pay the full amount of the last invoice they were going to terminate my service in four days! Now remember, throughout this dispute I've been paying my ongoing charges in full. The only amount I have not paid is the disputed charge, which I have been trying to get resolved. And for that, they're now going to turn off my service! Absolutely
insane -- turning off a service which I am fully paying for is more
than likely illegal on their part, certainly unethical.
So I try to explain to this representative what the problem is. He couldn't have been more disinterested. Not his problem. I need to call such-and-such a number. Call there, and get the exact same response. Another "couldn't care less" representative. Got another number to call, and finally get at least someone who
seemed interested in helping, who admits that it sounds like they have messed
up. She ends up forwarding me to someone who she says will get the problem fixed. Ah, maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel..... oops, nope. It's a train. Once again, a
brain dead rep that doesn't even want to listen to me. It simply
doesn't matter that it's their mistake. I must pay up, period.
Well, that was it for me. Hello,
DirectTV -- sign me up.
I don't see how you can call this anything other than outright fraud. This is a $500 million company -- you can't tell me their record keeping is so bad that they don't have a record of my returning the modem. Regardless, they can easily look at my statements and see that I haven't paid a modem rental fee for years, and therefore clearly do not have a modem. No, they clearly have a policy of simply charging customers who cancel their internet service for an "unreturned equipment charge", knowing full well that it's a fraudulent charge -- but hoping the customer doesn't have a receipt showing they returned the modem so that they can force the customer to pay that amount.
The Bottom Line
Charter Communications is an outlaw company. Don't do business with them.
