Tuesday, May 13, 2008

My odyssey with Charter Communications

Today I had a tech visit my condo. I haven't had Internet service since last Friday and it was becoming, as you can imagine, "a bit of an issue". We moved the cable modem around the place until we found a spot where it was happy in the bedroom. Only thing was it wasn't very happy: my fastest Internet up and download speeds were 100/24 kbs. Not only slow, but freaking slow!!!

So I called and canceled the service and began to investigate DSL (which has a bad reputation on the Island and being totally unstable and nearly unusable. A couple of hours ago Charter called me and wanted to see if we could "get the modem working". I told them about my speeds and reason for canceling but they wanted to "save an account" and "try to get it working". I need Internet and I don't need a phone line and Embarq doesn't sell "naked" DSL in this area so why not? We managed to get it working pretty well I'm happy to say. Granted I'm not getting the 5m/512k speeds I'm supposed to get but I'm happy with what I can get.

I also have things set up so I won't have to turn everything off each time I leave. Yeah, I'll be eating up a bit of extra electricity but quite frankly I don't care. Rebooting your cable modem seems to be a crap shoot down here so if I can just keep my modem and Airport Extreme going I'll be a happy camper.

Oh, almost forgot, I also have my Airport Express running as a 2.4 Ghz network for my devices that can't do 802.11 a. So that's cool, I think.

And for all you Apple TV owners there is a new update waiting for you so get downloading, ok?

That is all for now. Over and out from the Outer Banks.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Make sure you have them do a signal check on the cable at the modem. I had problems with my RoadRunner connection for a long time before I had them come out and check it. Come to find out, the actual cable that ran from the splitter on the back of my house to my office was crap. They replaced it with a higher quality (and much newer) cable, and voila! My internet connection is MUCH better now.