I recently decided to stop supporting the local cable company. I don’t think that all cable companies have the problems that I went through, but Charter, the local company in my city (Reno, Nevada) has got to be the worst company I have ever spent nearly $200 a month for.
Let me start from the beginning.
April, 2006 we moved to Reno. My fiancé and I are huge movie nuts and of course, I am a long time network/gadget guy that has to have top of the line everything. I have been a long time promoter of Cable modem services due to their ridiculous speeds available for home internet users (ridiculous isn’t really that crazy, but when you can get 10 megs of internet connection down, and 1 up, that’s perfect for anything you can think to do.)
My first month of cable service was horrible. Not that the picture was bad, but because the support / install / issues that came about with my account were absolutely retarded. For example, we moved from Las Vegas to Reno. Las Vegas has an area code of 702 and Reno used to be 702, but is now 775 (like 5 years ago it changed). Our first install was missed. Not because we were not at home, but because the installer decided to call ahead to see if we were home, and like a retard, did not notice the 702 and decided not to do the install. April and I waited all day long at the house and called multiple times and the Charter people (who are obviously disconnected from what is really going on) said “the tech said he is on his way” but were just saying this because we found out later that night (after they installs don’t get performed) that he had called and left a message (no message, no missed calls).
I was able to confirm that they called the wrong number and Charter apologized. At this point, I am not really upset because it could happen. So, finally they come and install my system. Install goes good, and everything is fine. We realize that we made a mistake and did not order the HD boxes. We call them back and they say they will be out the following weekend. No problem. We wait around.. nothing again. Now I am getting irritated. We call them and they tell us that the guy said he came to our house and nobody answered. BS! Now I am really pissed. We waited all day long and the guy totally lied and wasted our time. They reschedule a few days later (of course, I have to take off work for them to cover an 8 hour period that they may show up). I finally get my HD boxes.
Now that we have the HD boxes (two of them.. one for up and downstairs). We go to watch an on-demand movie, and we keep getting this error message. We call tech support and they try and figure it out and both boxes are not working. I am like, “come on, how come both boxes don’t work. There has got to be another problem”.
I am not kidding you, it took 2 weeks MORE time for them to get out and replace my boxes… which ironically worked (I didn’t think that was going to fix the problem, but it did) .
About 10 months later (not to sure), Charter communications advertises that 10 meg cable modem services are available to the city of Reno. I call up Charter and they report to me that my neighborhood does not show up as supporting more then 3 megs. Crap… but ok.. 3 megs is still nice. I call a couple months later, and get my system upgraded. I think my cable modem was costing me 80 a month now.. but hey, I have 1 meg upstream which is really nice when you work on networks and upload a lot of things (not to mention torrents)
Things go fine for months and month. Finally, I start to get an issue… and this is the start of the issue that in the end, has got me to stop doing business with Charter all-together.
I started to get some really strange packet loss. I had not experienced this yet, but at this point, it’s in February 2007. I call tech support and they let me know that there were some power-outages in my area and Charter is working on them. Ok…. That sounds like it could happen so I let it go. But, the problem does not stop. A few days later, I am still getting 10 – 15% packet loss pinging to multiple peering points on the internet. I call tech support and let them know and they tell me everything is working fine. At this point, its already starting to affect me because I cannot maintain a solid TCP connection to my servers when I am working on them.
Example Network Pinging from my house to my server
Same time, pinging to my old office network:
That’s just the start of it. A few weeks go by, things start to get worse. Now, my cable modem actually goes offline for hours at a time. I start by putting in a ticket with Charter to get a local cable guy out. Charter schedules a guy to come out. Of course, nobody shows or nobody calls. I stayed at home for no reason again. I call charter, complain to them and they reschedule. This time, someone shows up. They show up however when the system is back online… so they do some quick tests and see that there is no issue. They close the ticket. Of course, a couple hours later.. I am offline again. I call charter, they confirm they cannot see my cable modem, and re-setup a tech to come out in 2 days. I wait and someone shows up and of course, once again, the cable modem is working fine. Crap, how can I ever have this thing fail while they are there! By this time, I have not had reliable cable modem service for a few weeks.
24 hour period
Week View:
Visit 2 (when the guy shows up). Tests everything and things appear to be working. I thought it was fixed as he was able to get a full 10 megs of service.
System goes down again. This time I pull my cable modem out of my house and hook it up outside on the side of the house. Still, cable Sync light is flashing indicating a problem on the upstream (at least from what I know about the modem).
Visit 3, guy comes out, everything is up and running (of course) and when he leaves it goes down again for 3 or 4 hours.
Now at this point, I am getting upset with the whole thing. I call Charter again and they tell me I cannot get the number of a local rep, and the refuse to call me back on anything even to have a manager call me back. I Google around and find the local number for charter. I call it, and get a lady. She asks me how I got the number but I don’t disclose it. I explain my situation and she gets snotty with me, but she takes my number and has another guy call me back.
Now, this is where things start to work a little better for me. Now I have a guy who can follow my case history. This guy goes out of his way (at this point in time) to get things working for me. I am done calling charter support and asking for help… I now have this guy as my point of contact. His name is Jason Griffin. Jason tells me that he is going to send a network maintenance guy out to take a look. Apparently those guys are way more knowledgeable about the networks and he thinks he can figure it out.
Visit 4 - Network tech comes out. Knowledgeable guy and really wants to help. He can’t see the issue but does a full test. His name is John Wilson. He gives me his cell number to call him and let him know when it’s down again. He realizes that I have called and had several service calls in the past few weeks and is determined to figure it out. I call him 10 minutes after he leaves to let him know it is down again. He said he would return
Visit 4 – cable tech (john) comes out in the middle of the night and tests at the street. I know this because I was watching Jay Leno and the system went to static. I looked at the window… and I see the first visit from a cable tech whose name is John Wilson. It was down when he tested it, but it went online. He didn’t really change anything, but at least he showed up. He leaves, it goes down again and I call to let him know.
Visit 5 – He comes back and we hook it up. He sees the problem and starts making calls. He cant figure it out and said he has never seen this problem before. The system comes back up and he leaves.
Cable modem goes down again. John has to go and do some other work, so he can’t show up for a day or two. I can’t remember the full story about this, but he comes back a day or two later. He can see there is a problem at the street, but can’t figure out what is going on. The system comes back online.
Keep in mind, the downtimes are getting longer and longer at this point in time. Originally, it was only like 5 minutes of down time, and by the end of this fiasco, we were down for period of 12-20 hours at a time.
The final visit (visit 6 or 7, two months into this problem), Charter shows up with two Charter vans. The techs come out and at the time the system is offline, even at the street side. Just as these guys are talking with me about it, a neighbor comes out and tells me that they have had problems the last couple months and their cable modem has been offline. FINALLY someone comes forward on this. What makes me so upset about this is if they would have done this before, it would have helped with the situation. But, I am the only persistent guy to get this done and fixed. I guess being a nerd does that to you, but it’s annoying when you are trying to use your VOIP, or stream music to your computer and the network is bouncing for long periods of time.
John Wilson is my hero at this point because he replaces some major hardware in two major points around the neighborhood. The network stays online and stable and I am extremely happy. I don’t get 10 megs down like I should, but I get my full 1 meg up and that’s the most important part for me.
During this whole problem, I was emailing back and forth with Jason Griffin at Charter about the problem. I feel like he was instrumental to getting the problem resolved even though he was more of a point man for this issue.
Current Network View showing the problem going away:
August 2007 --- Great.. the problem is starting to come back again. I start the process of making sure its not my network. I look at the modem when it goes offline, and this time is the ready light that is being turned off. I think the Ready light is the upstream. I start my normal diagnostics including looking at the modems event logs. They are loaded with system errors.
I send off an email to Jason Griffin. The problem goes away.. but I never got any email back from Jason letting me know that he did anything. I figured it was just some network issue and it may not be related.
The next weekend, I get online and start to use it. The second I start to do anything, the network goes offline again. WTF! I am so irritated at this point. Instead of dealing with it, I end up driving across the city to my office (where I have 2 x DS3s to play with) just so I can do my work.
I email Jason a second time about this issue and this time I am upset that he had not returned my email or my phone calls. He write me back telling me that he basically is no longer in the dept that would handle my issue. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.. but still he should point me in the right direction. The way I took it was that he did not want me to bother him with it anymore.
The third weekend, its down again.. and this time a very long time. I call and leave messages for both John and Jason. Nobody calls me back at this point. I am seriously irritated and don’t want to go through this problem again. I call one last time to Charter support (which might I say is the worst and most frustrating support I have ever dealt with in my life). Since I have already wrote so much on this, I might as well write about their support too. Here we go:
When you call Charter support, you will be prompted with this female voice that will help you diagnose your problem. They start by asking you voice-recognition questions such as “is your internet connection not working” and then “is your computer turned on”. Those are like so dumb… I know that for some people, they may need to be asked these questions… but for others such as myself and my business partners, we obviously have checked this already.
Why cant support systems have a flag where you can be marked as an advanced user? Then instead of asking “is your modem plugged in” it can say “what lights are lit up, flashing, and not working” and then determine what to do from there?
Crap.. back to the topic. Anyhow, the guy on the phone when I finally got to an support tech basically told me that Charter does not do phone callbacks and he could have have a manager call me back on the phone. I could only talk to a supervisor, but the guy said he would not do anything for me ether. I was like.. are you kidding me? Can you see my case history? Who cares if I am running Windows XP or Linux. I have a Cisco router sitting before the cable modem router and I can see the network is down by the lights that indicate network status on the front. I need someone from our local office to call me back and get something setup.
He basically told me that nobody could do anything for me and of course while we were talking, the network went back up again. Screw it I thought to myself.. I am going to leave Charter.
After I hung up with Charter support, I took a few minutes to un-stress, and then decided that I don’t want to pay Charter for services anymore.
I called SBC and ordered DSL. I was force to buy a phone line that I don’t need because I have VOIP, but DSL requires that you have a stupid number. At least it was only like 6 dollars a month. Their services can get up to 6 megs.. but I doubt I’ll see that. We shall soon see.
I then called DirectTV and ordered their top-tier package with HD DVRs and HD Receivers. They are outside installing it now while I type this story up.
Later that day, John from charter called me and said that he did see my system down and he was monitoring it. I informed him that he should not worry about it as I don’t care about my Cable network anymore. I am leaving it and moving to DSL. He didn’t sound surprised and I am sure he was happy to know that I would not be calling him anymore.
Let’s hope I can get some luck out of DirectTV + DSL. I am way to annoyed to deal with this anymore. My business partner Henry picked up a T1 to his house in Las Vegas just because of the local provider issues that he did not want to deal with. We have only had maybe 2 or 3 down periods of time that were all CO related.