Dr. Charter To The Rescue

          

I was going to write this letter and email it to tech support or customer service but I opted to call them instead.

Dear Charter Communications,

          Ever since we had a service outage about three weeks ago due to strong winds, the speed of downloads has not gone back to the usual. I understand that speed varies but I have done speed tests several times and at different times of the day and it’s been constantly stuck at about 10 mbps and no speed boost. In the past, with speed boost, I would get about 20 mbps. The upload speed is still as advertised at slightly more than 3 mbps. Can you check as to why this is occurring? Thank you very much.

So that’s basically what I told the Charter Communications representative during our phone call. We tried troubleshooting over the phone and he said that it appears like a hardware or cable problem. He was going to send a technician in the afternoon.

Within the 2 hour appointment window and despite the heavy rain at times, Dr. Charter made a housecall. He ran the same speed test I did and got the same results. Then he asked me if I tried running the test on a wired connection. When we did that, the speed came back up. That was strange because I was getting the increased speeds on the wireless connection before. For some reason my wireless router had slowed down. Well, at least the technician discovered the problem and on his way out I said “thank you, Dr. Charter”, which made him laugh. Hopefully Charter Communications won’t charge me extra for the housecall. Good job, Charter! I’m keeping myself wired for awhile.

Here's an update: Charter indeed billed me $35.00 for the service call and it appeared on my next bill which was dismaying. However I thought I might contact customer service and ask the fee to be waived as a one time deal. After all, when you search their website, nowhere does it show that a customer would be billed for a service call, and I wasn't informed beforehand that I would be billed for it. I wasn't expecting too much but if I didn't ask, I would never know if they would grant my request. Well, Charter Communications did me very well again by waiving the service fee! I cannot say enough about the terrific customer service of this company. Thank you so much for your help Charter Communications. For someone like me whose income is not that big, it certainly helps a lot not having to pay the service fee. I'll be more careful next time I need assistance with a tech support problem. Charter Communications, You Rock!!!

          If I make make a suggestion: a disclosure up front would be nice :)
Here is my other post on Charter: A Surprise Gift From Charter Internet

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