Broadband Monopolies Have Charter to Steal
It's funny how most of the gripes I hear about broadband service come from areas where the high-speed Internet service choices are very limited. Or maybe it's not so funny. It's certainly no laughing matter for one reader who got tricked by Charter Communications into paying more for less service.
"There's more than one ISP engaged in shady practices," the reader wrote recently. "In fact, based on r
Follow @infoworldIt's funny how most of the gripes I hear about broadband service come from areas where the high-speed Internet service choices are very limited. Or maybe it's not so funny. It's certainly no laughing matter for one reader who got tricked by Charter Communications into paying more for less service.
"There's more than one ISP engaged in shady practices," the reader wrote recently. "In fact, based on recent experiences with several ISPs, I'd have to say that shady practices are the norm, along with extremely poor customer support and ill-informed sales people. The area where I live is one of those pockets where broadband is very limited, and I lived with ISDN long after many of my friends had DSL. Currently in the neighborhood I'm living in, Charter Cable has been the only high-speed provider for the last few years. I work from home and had signed up for both cable TV and broadband through them."
While it was nice he was finally able to ditch ISDN, the one thing the reader really missed was having a static IP address. "Since I have a need to run my own mail server, I was getting many mails bounced by other mail servers still depending on outdated blacklists that lump any server with a dynamic IP address into the spam bucket. I've tried twice to get static IP addresses, once through Clearwire, a wireless broadband company that took my signup fees after I explained why I wanted static IP address, and only informed me three weeks later that the reason my mail server wasn't able to send mail was that they filtered all outbound SMTP traffic! It took another month and a half to get my money back."
The reader would have been willing to pay more for a static IP address, but Charter then told him about a deal where he could pay less. "Recently, I signed up for Charter's 'business-class' service, which seemed to be the only way to get a static IP address," the reader wrote. "When I signed up, the business rep told me that it was currently a great deal because I could get the same service I was getting through my residential account, both cable TV and broadband, for $99/month instead of the $122/month the residential account was costing. I signed the contract he faxed me and waited eagerly for the new service. If only I'd noticed the three-year commitment buried in the fine print..."
