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admin on Saturday, November 13th, 2010 |
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This is a short tirade on my feelings about Charter Communications and their service. In my opinion Charter has the worst customer service in the industry. In our local area Charter recently acquired Sudden Link Communications. The service immediately went to pot and it wasn’t too good before that. Charter claimed that it was due to upgrades being preformed on the system and in a few days we would have 8.0 Meg download speeds. Shortly after this announcement they pushed the service restoration update to December 7 or beyond for 2010.
The second thing was an immediate increase in the price for the same service. Charter upped my bill from $79 per month to over $100 per month with no increase in service and no reason given. Lucky for me my bank would not accept their payment deduction since it did not come from an established provider. I had no contract with Sudden Link and Charter gave no reason when called. The customer service from their call center was rude and not at all in line with what I would expect from a nationwide service provider.
When I called Charter to fire them they could not find the account. I called in again the next day and they found the account just fine. I canceled the account but received billing for November and December. This was an unauthorized billing. Charter was notified to remove their equipment and lines from my property. This has not been done. However the joke is on them, since the lines run across land leased to an independent corporation and they have no easement. The corporation will assess them $10 per day storage and trespass charges until the lines are removed.
We were now looking for a new internet provider and TV service. Since a good friend and customer is the IT Manager for Benton REA we checked they out first. There service record is great but they buy their bandwidth from Charter Communication and I wanted nothing more to do with Charter. Charter froze out Sudden Link by restricting the bandwidth that they supplied in such a manner the Sudden Link could no longer be competitive in the market place. I hope that they don’t do the same thing to Benton REA as they are a well established service oriented local cooperative.
We replaced our TV with Direct TV. Their installation was very professional and their customer service has been excellent. Our company has gone to Clear Communications for internet service. Currently we get about 3 meg download speed and 1 meg upload speed. That is about as good as it get where we live. This action saves us almost $75 per month, provides several hundred TV channels and adequate internet service.
The bottom line is that for those of us trying to conserve our cash always look for ways to reduce fixed cost services. If you look around you can usually get a better deal. When a provider automatically ups the price it is a red flag that it is time to go hunting.
In summary Charter has the worst customer service that I have ever seen and you should be very careful of their billing.