Complaint Review: Charter Communication

I have been a Charter subscriber for 23 years." Notice how we are now referred to as a numerical value "subscriber" so to be counted like sheep. The idea of customer relationship is now a foreign concept.

I'm not going to rant like other and just get to the point. The decay in connection speed consistency rate and the increase counts of dropped signals have increased proportionally with subscriber increase. Bandwidth speed increase is not an added feature to benefit the subscriber, you see the bandwidth "aka frequency" is a fixed value due to federal licensing limits. Speed increase is a system requirement in order to maintain network function as system loading increases and subscribers are added. This supposed upgraded benefit to the subscriber as an increase of connection speed ( at additional cost ) is actually necessary to keep the system network functioning. You can only fit so many x and 0s through the existing infrastructure ( that wire hanging from the pole) with limited bandwidth.

I believe the new fix is bandwidth allocation (prioritization). The end result is sloped service delivery. In other words, the page loading rate will be 3meg now and drop to 800k in ten minutes then return to 3meg maybe fifteen minutes later. Charter does disclose this in their advertising as " Connection rates may vary". Guess no one can really grasp this concept until the contract is signed and the "connection" is made.

The issues I've experienced over the past 3 years in being provided with consistent service have gone unresolved. The boys have been out several times and there is always a different reason for the problem. Here are my current experiences with actual service; off hours 9pm to 6:30 am Monday thru Friday, no problems. Between 6:30am and 7:45am the page file loading becomes painfully slow. Most of the time between 7:50am and 8:10am the download just times out (no download) or drops connection (skewed bandwidth allocation). This coincidentally occurs about the same time commercial customers like a banks go online.

Filing a complaint with the PSC yields the same results as urinating on a forest fire.

The aforementioned is my opinion and based in my experience as master certified auto technetium trained in the advanced automotive application of multiplex communication, my experience with computers (my first was an IBM 8086), conversations I have held with a very experienced computer technetium that deals with these issues, my observations in using the internet service, and finally ( I can think ).

David
Elkhorn, Wisconsin
U.S.A.