Very Disappointed With Charter Business!
I’ve been with Charter Cable for several years now but recently I had to move. I cancelled my residential services. Where I moved to, they needed a static IP address so that meant having to go with Charter Business. Over the past week, I have been absolutely shocked at the amount of shit Charter Business can’t do for you. From saving my old email to even providing proper wireless signal strength and everything in between. I am so pissed off and disappointed with Charter Business.
I should have known they were going to suck when the installer first came out. I told him the room that would be the primary office. I then said there’s another room we’re going to need internet access in. He told me it doesn’t matter. They don’t do that. They hook up a wireless router and the phone service and cable TV boxes and that’s it. If we want internet in any other room, it has to either run off the wireless or we have to run an Ethernet cable. If we were using Charter Residential they could hard wire into any room without a problem. This was strike one.
Strike two came later when I went to hook up my Xbox. I’ve always had it hardwired because it’s better for gaming. Wireless isn’t designed for gaming and it’s the number one cause of lag in multi-player gaming. I turn on my Xbox and I discover it’s so old that I need an adapter for it to receive the signal. I go buy the wireless adapter (That was a whole other story of failure and frustration). After visiting two Walmarts’ I finally find it at Target for 55 bucks. It’s simple to install, snaps on to the back of the Xbox and then plugs to the USB port in the back.
I turn on the system and I run the wireless test it needs to run to make sure I can connect to Xbox Live. And, it fails. It tells me that I need to open up port 3074 on my router and my NAT needs to be set to Open. Mine was set to Moderate. Until I make these changes, I cannot connect.
I immediately grab my laptop and plug right in to the router to make the necessary changes. I can’t log in to it. I look up online using the manufacturer’s own website and nothing suggested on their site is working. I call Charter Business. I am told that they don’t work on the SMC router’s. I need to call SMC for assistance. I asked why they bothered to hook up a router that they don’t even support any more. She said it’s old and we don’t support them. I said, “You just hooked the goddamn thing up yesterday!”
Ten seconds later I am on the phone with SMC and I get another recording. It asks if I am calling about router installed by a cable company. I press the corresponding number to get me to that department. It than starts to list cable companies and when they get to Charter Business, I press that number. Now I am getting somewhere, I think! The phone starts to ring and then I get another recording. “Welcome to Charter Cable” Couldn’t even talk to anyone at SMC because it would appear if you have their router through a cable company they seem to believe it’s the cable companies issue.
After pressing this button and that I get back to a real person. I again explain my situation, this lady is slightly more informed. She explains that Charter Business doesn’t allow you to access the router. This floored me. It’s a business account. If I want to access my router because I am trying to run a fucking business, it’s just common sense that I should be allowed to do so. Charter Business doesn’t think so. So I have to tell them what ports I want open. She explains that she can open ports for me, but she can’t change the NAT settings as they don’t actually log into the router. They just somehow tell it to except various ports.
I say thanks and let her know that I will give this a try. I log on to Xbox and start to play only to find that I can’t play yet. The game has put me on probation. Since my connection kept dropping out I had been booted from a couple of games shortly after they started. So now I have to sit and wait for a 5 minute countdown until I can play again. My five minutes are up. I join a game, sure enough, I lag out. I run the Xbox test again and this time, it connects me right away to Xbox Live. No warnings at all, though it still shows my NAT as being set to moderate. I also notice the wireless signal is pretty week.
So Strike Two and Strike Three were that that they lied to me by telling me that they didn’t service the SMC Routers when in fact they do. Strike Three, they don’t allow access to the wireless router. This has got to be the most ridiculous thing I have every heard of. But, we’ve still got a few more strikes to go yet.
Strike Four begins with my week signal. I check the router and I notice that it doesn’t have an antenna like pretty much every other wireless router in the world does. I grab my cell phone and switch to wireless and log in. The signal in my office not more than twenty feet away from the router is week. Really?! I call in again to see if they can boost the router strength, if I was allowed by charter to access my own damn router I could have this all fixed in a few minutes. I am told that my signal strength is set to high. So basically they are telling me that their SMC Router is so goddamn shitty that from 20 feet away the signal is near death.
Strike Five. I have been a using Charter.net email for several years now. That means my email was mynickname@charter.net. I am told that as soon as they close out my charter residential account that I can log in to the business account and reset up that email. So tonight my MS OUTLOOK is giving me the alert that it can no longer access the charter mail. I am tired, I have been moving all day every day for like two damn weeks. Either moving, packing or unloading. Every day it’s a shitload of crap and even though I was dead tired I call Charter because I really need that email.
I am told by the Charter Business customer service guy that when you have a business account, you can’t have an @charter.net email. Only the residential folk get that perk! So once again I have called Charter Business and once again I have been told some bullshit reason why they can’t fucking fix something! And, what really pisses me off the most is not that I was lied two damn times. It’s their happy arrogance and their complete inability to comprehend why I am not pleased with their service. The guy today even tells me when I say, “WOW, I am shocked that once again I am calling with a problem and Charter Business cannot solve it.”
“But, what we offer is so much more than residential. You don’t need a charter.net email. We can set you up with your own email if you have your own domain. I wanted to slap this dumbass! My response was something like, “I design websites, I have dozens of domains and email addresses. I don’t need you to host my own domains email, that’s what the hell I pay my hosting company for! I could care less that could you host it if was too stupid to have my own hosting! What I need is the email that I have been using for the past 6 years to work!”
So let’s break this down in a quick little summary.
- I was lied to twice.
- They don’t allow access to to their wireless router.
- The wireless router that Charter Business installs is complete shit.
- They only install one router for a basic business hookup.
- If you want anything more than wireless in another office, you’re shit out of luck. You have to do it yourself.
This has only been the first week with Charter Business. I can’t wait to see how bad they are going to fuck my life next week!
Thanks Charter Business you have moved into my top ten list of things that suck. You’ve taken the lead by coming in just ahead of Fox News, Jay Leno and Justin Beiber’s music. Congratulations Charter Business!
