Review by Syian 
UPDATED: 1 year ago
member for 1 year, 20 visits, last login: 329 days ago
 Gwinn,Marquette,MI
 $110 per month (12 month contract)
 about 2 days
 "no monthly transfer limits"
 "damn near everything else."
 "GOD! SAVE US RURAL MICHIGANDERS FROM CHARTER!"
| Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection Reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:
(ratings below consensus)
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Well, around here (rural U.P. of michigan) we have two options for broadband, SBC Yahoo! DSL (which i had when i lived in marquette, wasn't too bad) and Charter.
Where I live now (an repurposed/refurbished old air force base), DSL is not available. Which leaves us with..charter.
My housemates and I have the 10M/1M connection for about 110 a month after "taxes and surcharges" and we rarely even see 3M/768k on our connection, during the periods it's up.
We know our router is going, so we have tried testing without the router in the loop, same results. Our connection goes up and down like a french hooker named harold. When it's up, it stays up for a few hours at best, crashes, resets the modem, and goes back up for a couple hours, crashes, resets the modem, rinse wash repeat.
We have checked the wiring in the house, it's fine (yay for cable testers). This was after we moved the modem from beind the 5 (yes. FIVE.) splitters the tech installed the modem behind. I have yet to run DocsDiag on our modem, but my housemate said that when he checked the modem's stats page the numbers looked alright to him, so... what gives with this "Comtastic" service we're getting?
Customer Service? Charter? You mean "Habeeb" over in india? We call him between 3 and 5 times a week asking for help. We have yet to recieve any. Much less a truck roll to see if the damn wiring OUTSIDE our house is any good. Every time we call we get the "power cycle your modem" string of questions, and when we ask for pertinent info concerning the SNR and Rx/Tx strength of our modem, "Habeeb" always says something like "I do not have access to that information".
yeah. Sure. There's really broadband competition out here. FFS.
NOTES :
1) no, the guy in tech support isn't really named "Habeeb". Nor is it meant as a slur, it's more to give you an idea of the type of person we consistently get tech support from, read "Untrained, unintelligable, and generally useless"
2) i apologize for the slight profanities that are in this review, it's just that i'm fed up, would LOVE to change to a different provider, except that there IS NOT ONE.
Followup comments:  
defiant
MVM
join:2000-09-04
Whitmore Lake, MI
 ·Vonage
| Additional help Every time we call we get the "power cycle your modem" string of questions, and when we ask for pertinent info concerning the SNR and Rx/Tx strength of our modem, "Habeeb" always says something like "I do not have access to that information".
There are members of the Charter CATV/HSI forum that do... If you do decide to post a request for assistance, please take a look at the posting recommendations first.
Take care. | |
| rbrugman
join:2002-09-22
Marquette, MI
| 10/1 I live in Marquette and haven't had any problems. We only have 5/512 and get the speeds advertised, but I do know that the system in the UP cannot handle 10 meg. During peak times I pull down to about 3 as you do, but at night or in the morning they are fine. I've only had one Tech no-show and that was on Christmas eve for the phone service which went crazy and wouldn't let us call.
Next time you are in Marquette you should stop by the local Charter office (Chippewa Square) and talk to them there about getting some service. I don't know if there is an office in Gwinn. | |
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