Charter as an ISP

Charter went off the deep and and really ticked me off this past weekend. Camp Hatteras, who pays monthly for three individual "high speed" Internet lines, was off-line for just over two days for their primary Internet connection. Why? Because Charter decided so. No, really, Charter just decided to block the Cable MAC address from their system. No reason, warning or justification was given.

I got on the phone with Charter and they were trying to tell me that the modem "wasn't seeing" the Charter cable system and had to be replaced. In short, they said it was broken. No so fast! I hooked my Mac right up to the Ethernet port and cranked up TCPDUMP and guess what I saw? Broadcasts, multicasts and DNS traffic just as I would have expected.

We ended up getting another tech on-site and I managed to get on the phone with the guy behind the scenes and this is when he told me the Cisco 815 ISR would have to come out. I fired back a salvo stating that the Cisco was purchased because I was told I could use any DOCSIS 2.0 compliant modem, and I was told this by Charter, and we placed the Cisco on the network *OVER TWO YEARS AGO* and it had been running fine up until this past Thursday when it suddenly stopped working.

No, my friendly yet firm voice on the other end of the phone told me. "It's got to come out, someone could hack into this and take control of all or Charter's IP Addresses." "Look", I told him, "I'm not new to netwokring, in fact I've been doing this over 20 years. The Cisco CAN ONLY BE ACCESSED locally through the cosole port, there are no ssh or telent ports, or any other ports, open on this unit."

It all fell on deaf ears. I was told some sad story about a network administrator who was placed in jail because his Cisco was hacked (????) but, in the end, they allowed the unit back onto their network because the tech did not have another business-class modem with him on his truck. "But make no mistake" he said "it's going to get replaced."

So now I have to take this up with our friendly sale manager. If there is some policy stating that Cisco gear is on the disavowed list I'm going to have to see that documentation for myself. And Charter is going to have to provide free service equivalent to the cost of the model (about $1000.00 if I recall).

If all this wasn't irritating enough my cable service in the condo was anything but "high speed" this weekend. I got, perhaps, twice as fast as dial-up with time-outs, high latency and more retransmissions than you could shake a stick at. Truly awful service. If Embarq sold "naked" DSL in the area I'd give it a try. I'm honestly that sick of dealing with Charter.