April 20, 2008

Charter Communications internet service has had a regional outage in Madison since Friday evening.

I know it's regional, because that's what the recorded message tells me when I try to call. It was confirmed by a representative doing an on-line chat with me just now. (I'm on line at a café.) She told me I could have my account credited for the lost service if I call another number, but I don't feel like spending time on the telephone waiting on hold and so forth, just to get a few dollars. Why don't they program their computers so that the credit is automatic? I wrote that suggestion to the person who was chatting with me and suddenly lost contact with her. Just another outage? Or are they under instructions to break off contact if you say certain things?

9 comments:

rhhardin said...

Because you pay off only where there's a high value in paying off, if you pay off the complainers only.

The telephone company doesn't rebate anything when your line's down ; though they'll credit you $10 if they miss an appointment, the result of some consumer activist effort somewhere.

rhhardin said...

The Charter Communications website is spectacularly unhelpful, which only means that you have to hope that it doesn't break because you're on your own if it does.

There's a sort of turbo-hype genre of ways to link to nothing but other turbo-hype pages, that's come into being with the web, with no content anywhere.

Nobody has done a parody yet.

bill said...

Here's a website to bookmark: DSL Reports. When my DSL went down for a few days and the ISP was spectularly unresponsive (leading to rumors the company was going under), the user forums there were about the only place customers could trade information...including reviewing other ISPs to jump to.

There was another outage just this Friday -- AT&T's fault -- and learning from their earlier PR missteps, the company posted updates in the forums.

Bob said...

Was the outage caused by the earthquake?

rhhardin said...

Google news has a Charter outage in Georgia April 17th I think, due to a bullet strike on a fiber optic cable.

Those highway signs with bullet holes mean something down there.

Peter V. Bella said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Ann,
I'm in Madison and use Charter. I'm currently on-line and have not had problems with Charter since Friday. Can't be a regional outage...I'm less than a mile from you.

Ann Althouse said...

Thanks, Lumiere, you're not the first person to tell me that. Either they are out or they are lying to me. I kind of hate them either way. This has been going on for 2 days.

Guesst said...

Ever since David Barford and Kent Kalkwarf cheated Charter's shareholders (convicted and sentenced to Marion,IL), Charter has had nothing but problems.

I am waiting for the day Jerry Kent buys Charter back, after selling it years ago.