New Day, New Hatred For Charter

Charter Logo

I was happy a few days ago with my updated Charter broadband speeds. Figured today I’d have to have some therapy. My love hate relationship continues.

My overly priced $142.03 HD Cable, Internet and Phone “Bundle” decided to unbundle itself – now coming in at $177.99 – I just about gagged myself.

Called into customer service and they can’t make any adjustments. Every year for many, many years Charter has been kind enough to reset my promo for another 12 months… Usually a few dollars more (meaning less than $5). This time around I’d have to buy more channels… More HBO and Cinemax. More Stars… Things we don’t need or want to watch. I asked for a line manager since I wanted to express my loyalty to Charter that seemed to be going unnoticed.

Line manager comes online and blows attitude after a few words of my background story. I asked why the attitude and he cuts me off and puts me on hold. Then tells me for $147.77 a month I can keep what I already have for 6 more months.

How hard can it be? I suppose for another $5 I could have picked up some more movie channels. Bleh. No wonder why they’re almost bankrupt. Customer service has always been their issue. Of course, people wouldn’t be calling into customer service if they didn’t screw up their billing and promotions all the time. People in the field have always been great.

Best of luck out there… I know a few of you are having your own issues. Care to share?

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  1. Hatred is a good word for how I feel about Charter as well. They are, hands down, the worst company I have ever had any dealings with. Over the years, their services have been generally overpriced and, for me at least, don’t really work the way they should.
    At the house I lived in when they first became my ISP, I had all sorts of issues with “weak signal strength”. Basically what that means is, I could lose Internet access at any time, and I would never know how long it might be before it came back. I would call them and have them send a service tech. They would check stuff and try things, and I might have no problems with my connection for a week, or two weeks, or a month. Then the same problem would start up again. This went on for years, and they never did fix it. When I moved out of that house, I was hoping it was something about that place that caused all the problems. So I moved into a different house and got my Internet hooked up. It worked fine for the first two months. Then I started having this problem where I would be disconnected from the Internet many times each day. The disconnections would last for no more than five minutes, but I’m sure you can envision how much of a problem that can be when it happens all day long, over and over again. Charter sent someone out to look things over. He told me he thought the problem was that the coax cable connecting the house to the hub was really old and it was just buried in the dirt (they are usually in some sort of conduit or something). He asked me for the phone number of the owner of the house (it’s a rental), so he could get the okay to dig up the old cable and replace it. He said I wouldn’t be charged for this, but it might be about three weeks before it would happen. That was a month ago. I was talking to the owner of the house recently, and I asked him if he had ever received a call from Charter about this. He said no.
    I also got the mailing about the free upgrade in bandwidth. There was a phone number on it you could call if you had any questions about it. Once it was confirmed that I needed a new modem to get 25Gbit speeds, I wanted to know what my options were in getting this new modem. I was told Charter would deliver it right to my house for a fee, or they could send it to me in the mail, or I could get one at the local Charter office. I elected to get it from the local office, but when I got there, they told me I could only get it sent to me in the mail. Even when they actually do something nice for their customers for once, it’s a hassle. What I’m trying to say is, you can’t trust anything anyone who represents their company tells you, and you never know if they’re just blowing you off. And the free upgrades haven’t made me forget about that one year where they increased the price of Internet access by ten dollars per month twice in the same six month period! Read over that again. It sounds ridiculous, but those are the sorts of things you can do when you have a monopoly.
    Here’s another example: I have also had cable TV through Charter at times. I don’t watch alot of TV, so I have their basic package. The trouble is, they keep changing the numbers of the channels, and each time they do this, the basic package has less channels! There has been no explanation for this and no mention of reducing the price. They simply let you know now and then that they are reassigning the numbers of some channels and those who have basic cable will have less channels for the same price.
    If Charter had any competitors here, they would be run out of town so fast it’s not even funny. Nobody here seems very satisfied with them, but there’s no viable alternative. I’m hoping Comcast will enter the marketplace in my area soon.

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