I have never, since 1992 seen such horrible service from an Internet Service Provider. If you have any other options for an ISP, I highly suggest you explore those other options. You definitely won’t find a positive review of Charter Pipeline at any respectable consumer information site. I’m not even talking about not receiving the speeds as advertised or you pay for, I’m just talking about availability. Charter’s Internet service is down more than it is up on most occasions. People pay a monthly fee for their unbelievably shitty service, Charter never pro-rates their bill due to outages on their end. And they will rarely admit to the outage being their fault. The best you can do is argue until you get a certain amount off your next bill. That amount never goes above $15 – $20. That is all their lackies are allowed to issue. In the end, if you use Charter, you overpay for a service that you don’t get to benefit from in the slightest.
You should also get in the habit of checking your bill. On numerous occasions we’ve seen billing errors. It is up to you, the consumer to catch Charter’s mistakes, report them, and make sure you receive compensation. Paying your bill is a hassle in itself. I can’t tell you how many hoops I had to jump through just so my wife could pay the bill over the phone (which thankfully isn’t provided by Charter or it wouldn’t work.)
Don’t dare call any of their service representatives unless you are ready to translate thick Indian accents that will absolutely not deviate from the script sitting in front of them. The scripts they read from immediately put the blame on your end. Before you know it, you will be rebooting your machines, unplugging everything, swapping out cables, etc. All this before they will even type a fucking zip code into their machine to see if outages have been reported. And by the way, they don’t even log reported outages as a problem until a minimum of 10 different people/locations have called about the same issue. So there you are, stuck – and awaiting a bill for service you do not get. How this company stays in business is a mystery.
Here’s a report I ran testing out the connectivity through Charter.
Outage report as seen by new jersey USA
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DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:48 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period
Outage report as seen by california USA
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DOWN 2007-08-01 21:32:57 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6076 minutes)
** You had 39.72% reachability during the period
Outage report as seen by san francisco USA
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DOWN 2007-08-01 21:42:58 - 2007-08-06 02:48:57 (6065 minutes)
** You had 39.84% reachability during the period
Speed test history
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2007-08-01 21:20:42 2824/233 kilobits per second down/up
The results speak for themselves. Up to 60% of the time, there is no Internet connection. That’s pitiful and it just gets worse.
You can read my full review from 2007 here.
