 Review by DaSneaky1D 
UPDATED: 69 days ago
member for 7.7 years, 3815 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 The Lou
 $69 per month
 "16mbps tier is available"
 "It's not working too well in St. Louis at the moment...at least for me"
 "Normally a solid service, but I'm having issues as of late"
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Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings above consensus)
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Update - 10/28/08
I've upgraded to the 16mbps/2mbps tier...and it's been a wild ride so far. For the last three weeks, my routing is questionable when traffic hands off to their off-net provider. Latency to Chicago use to be a steady 20ms, now it's over 45ms. While that may seem like a small increase, this has been accompanied with erratic speeds and an upload that averages 500kbps to third party speed tests and no more than 1mbps internally to speedtest.charter.com. Tech support shows my line stats to be within the acceptable range.
Update - 3/9/08
Upgraded to Charter's 10mbps/1mbps tier about a year ago. No complaints what-so-ever. Speed is always there and latency is still super low. Now, when Charter gets off their tail and finally offers the 16mbps/2mbps package, I'll get that too!
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Update - 12/21/06
I dropped down to Charter's 3mbps/256kbps tier. Speed is still good and consistent. The only down side I see is their pricing. Coming to the end of 2006, charging anything more than $35 for 3mbps service is nonsense, yet Charter's unbundled price is $45. Faster tiers are even more.
I'm still happy with the service, but as my needs and priorities change, me (the willing and able buyer) really sees a poor value for unbundled service.
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Update - 3/15/06
Still cruising along with Charter. Have nothing negative to say about their HSI offerings in my area.
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Update - 7/6/05
Charter upgraded their fastest tier to 5mbps/512kbps. Service quality is till the same. I consistently see my advertised speeds and latency is still extremely low at all times. Way to go!
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Update - 1/3/05
Charter 3meg service. Simply put, it's fantastic. No outages, besides one whole cable system outage in StL City (north). Latency is super low as always. I never have any slow down.
Only service related issue is Charter's flaky DNS servers. I use Level3's (especially nice since they use L3 as their backbone provider) so any related problems are transparent by me. All in all, I have no fault to find with them.
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I had SBC DSL, which I always received terrific service from, but decided to try Charter since I was getting rid of my static IP's with SBC to lower my bill. I got on with the 2 months free deal with Charter to test them out. I ordered the service in the morning and picked up the modem while on the way home from work, to a waiting connection. Now that's quick! I immediately noticed that latency was much lower on their network and the speeds were a bit higher as well, due to cap differences.
The real selling point came when I found out Charter was upgrading to the 2Mbps cap. When I power cycled my modem and received the new config file, my mouth dropped. StL users have 2.5Mbps/192kbps caps, and I get always get 2.3-2.4Mbps/181kbps speeds. Always! When playing certain games, I typically play on the lowest latency server I can find open. I found that even a 30ms ping server is "high" for my taste. Since most games do not register latency lower than 20ms, I always ignored anything reported as a "1" for the ping assuming that it meant "1 second or greater". After testing one of those servers, I found that my ping on those servers was around 7ms-15ms -- even during heavy action on screen.
Tech support has been on the ball for me the one time I needed them. The DNS servers respond very quickly. I don't like that I can't send mail while off their network, so that is a strike against them.
Who knows. The surrounding conditions of why my service is impressive may change. But for now, I'm in awe.
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Charter Pipeline
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They [Charter] finally got it right