Text 44499, 90 rader
Skriven 2008-03-17 21:36:18 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
  Kommentar till text 44490 av Ross Cassell (1:123/456)
Ärende: Re: News of my demise...
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RC>JB> Do you by any chance have Charter Cable?
 
RC> Yes and they are the only player.. I cant get DieSeL
 
We can get DSL through Sprint (or Embarq, whatever) or whoever offers it around
here, but not only is it not as fast and I believe not as cheap, but there's a
$100 or so fee if you break contract before a year's time.  Forget that.
 
 
RC> I really havent had that much trouble with their service, they arent any
RC> worse than Intermedia or the @home service. Intermedia franchise was
RC> purchased by Charter, @Home went bellyup if you recall.
 
The very first day Charter switched on our cable internet, they did it at the
lowest possible service speed.  Which was a disappointing 50KB/s.  Not very fun
shared between all the computers of the house.  I had been so excited to
finally get high-speed, too.  We had requested what was at the time the top
tier they had.  So I had to wait the entire extended weekend with it before I
could call them about it.
 
Fortunately when I did call, I talked to a nice lady who was able to also fix
our email account and let me pick a password, since that had apparently also
been messed up. Then I was passed along to a fellow in the tech department who
acknowledged it had accidently been put on the wrong speed, and switched us up.
 It was at about 360KB/s down and around 30KB/s up at that point.  I think it
was supposed to be four or five megabit, but obviously you rarely get what's
advertised with such things. But that speed was fine, and I was more than
satisfied to be browsing in high speed finally.
 
While the email account she fixed up for me worked, the Charter login page on
their site didn't.  That's where you're supposed to be able to change your
passwords, make other email accounts, and use your web space and such. But I
decided it wasn't worth calling in again to straighten out at that point. I
never use their email for anything anyway, so it wasn't very important.
 
They also lost tons of customer emails here a month or two anyway, which makes
me more glad I never used it for anything important.  I guess they sent those
folks the reimbursements they promised by now.
 
 
RC> They aint traffic shaping like Comcast is..
 
Which is what I always tell people myself when they ask me about Charter.
Comcast sounds pretty awful, both from the news I hear as well as people I know
that have it.  I saw a list of the practices of many ISPs once before, and
Charter was in the minority in terms of not filtering and throttling.
 
 
RC> I am not going to jump on the Anti-Charter bandwagon until they start
RC> mimicing some of the things Time Warner or Comcast are doing.
 
Yeah I'm by no means anti-Charter, but they've done their share to rub me wrong
a few times.  Usually over their cable TV service.
 
But to give Charter some positive press, about a year ago they gave us
increased internet speed, and said it was a trial of one of the better tiers
until the end of the year.  Well the end of the year came and went, and as far
as I know, we're permanently raised to it from what I understand.  We get about
600KB/s down and 60KB/s up, which is practically double.  Even if it's a
mistake like they did to start with, you don't see me complaining.
 
 
RC> I do get those temporary outages whenever they do maintenace or some
RC> internet glitch happens at one of their peering points, but thats par for
RC> course.
 
I used to get a lot of DNS trouble out of Charter to the point that I was using
another server just to avoid it.  But that seems to be straightened out for the
most part.  There's still the occasional connectivity issue in general, but it
seems to mostly be at night, which is probably the most non-peek time for them
to do any work (assuming that's the cause of such outages).
 
I do have one rather large complaint about one of Charter's internet practices.
 404 hijacking.  When you type in an url that doesn't exist, you get redirected
to Charter's custom error page rather than getting a standard error return.
This can cause problems for some software that expects to get that error if the
domain doesn't exist.  I also don't appreciate the sponsored advertisement
links on the page, which is why they did it in the first place.  I pay for this
service, I don't want advertising on it. The solution, of course, is to use a
non-Charter DNS server (again), but I shouldn't have to.  And other people
don't know that it's possible, or that it's abnormal.
 
 
RC> I have yet to find a perfect service provider for anything, lemme know
RC> when you do.. :)
 
Depends on whether Fidonet still exists when I find one!

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