Charter Bandwidth Police

It was bound to happen sooner or later. There were obvious signals that perhaps I should have taken into consideration. Heck – I’ve talked about it on here at least a half dozen times.

The Charter Bandwidth Police.

Last week there was a message on our answering machine stating that I needed to call back Charter Internet Security. This sounded a little worrisome especially since they left a case number. A hacked account? Mysterious content (kind of like when your credit card calls you from the fraud department…) Nope – Charter wanted to let me know I was flagged as a high bandwidth customer.

Specifically – I needed to cut back how much I was downloading. I asked, “How much did I use?” to which their response was very specific – “933 gigabytes.”

“Whoa – that’s a lot” I replied. Charter continued to say that they recently updated their policy and that I should really only be using 250 gigabytes a month or less. Most of their customers use less than 25 gigabytes Charter continued to tell me.

Considering 25 gigabytes of data wasn’t even enough to download one version of the software I use with my customers, this seemed perplexing.

I followed up stating that I actually work from home and download a lot of software for my job (which I do) and that February was a particularly busy month for releases (which it was). But when I inquired as to “how would a customer know how much they’ve been using” they simply stated there wasn’t a way currently. I would have to call into the customer service line for them to let me know if I was getting close. If only I had known!!

Guess I did know…

Fair enough… Of course, 250 GB can be downloaded in a little less than a day with my current bandwidth tier – maybe I should call them every day? Just to make sure I’m not over yet?

To be fair – I do work from home and to date I’ve accumulated about 350 gigabytes of product, but it’s quite possible there were some other items downloaded in February.

Clearly I won’t be trying to break the 1 terabyte usage in a month record any time soon…

 

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