About 5 months ago I began noticing an advertisement campaign from Charter that was pushing their new cable phone service. Being a former dissatisfied Vonage customer, I was cautiously optimistic when I found out that Charter was offering this service (presumably using some form of voice over IP technology). I didn't swap over immediately for two reasons, 1. I wanted to let some other people be the guinea pigs, but more significantly 2. It wasn't yet offered in my area.
After a couple of months the Charter phone service became available in my area. I waited another few months and had not become aware of any major complaints with the service from people who had signed up early. Then, out of nowhere, our AT&T phone lines go dead. After going several days with no phone service an AT&T technician services the line but says that the main lines across the street from my house are rotten (whatever that means... phone lines are not organic as far as I know) and the service will continue to have problems. He even admitted that he may have knocked out some of my neighbors service when he tried to repair mine. In fact, his tone and demeanor seemed to indicate that he wasn't confident that AT&T would have the line replaced completely any time soon. So for the time being, my phone was working but it had a loud background hum and was apparently susceptible to going out again at any given time.
At this point I figured that there was no better time than now to try out the Charter phone service. After all, the only physical phone lines that would be utilized for the Charter service are the lines that are physically located within my house. All data transmission outside of my house occurs via the Charter coaxial cable. So I setup a bundled package including cable tv, internet and phone. My savings will be on the order of $60 per month for the first year, then it will bump up to ultimately be about a $35 per months savings (over my charter + AT&T combo I had previously).
My cable tv package remained the same. My internet package includes their basic service, which bumps me up from 1.5 Mbps to 5 Mbps download bandwidth and doubles my upload bandwidth (these speeds are theoretical - I have not tested them). The Charter phone package includes all the usual stuff like call waiting and caller ID, but also includes unlimited long distance within the country as well as some unlimited and/or cheap international rates.
They scheduled a technician to come out about 4 days from the time I placed the order. The installation went smoothly. I will explain briefly how the phone setup works in layman's terms (because I really don't know how it works in technical terms).
- They locate a cable outlet that is located near a phone jack (or install a new cable jack).
- A cable comes out of the cable jack and is plugged into a small box that presumably handles the conversion of data so that the phones can understand it.
- A phone line comes out of this box and plugs into a phone jack on the wall. This sends the phone "signal" to all of the other phone jacks in your house.
- Now you simply plug your phones into your existing phone jacks and they all work just like they did before.
In my case, I had a cable and phone jack in close proximity to my computer desk, so they simply used a splitter on the cable outlet. Once line went to the phone box and the other went to the cable modem.
The service was installed on September 4th, the opening day of the NFL season. This is irrelevant to most people, but happened to be a much anticipated event for me personally. That night I was enjoying the game midway through the second quarter when the screen went blank. I panicked and went to the other room. Sure enough, it was out in there too. So I immediately went to get online to check Charters web site and also pull up the NFL.com site to follow the game. Of course the internet is also not functional. I'm pretty annoyed at this point so I pick up the phone to call Charter... oh yea, my phone now through Charter too, thus broken at the moment.
It turns out that there just happened to be a brief outage in the area. My services were restored in about 45 minutes, but it was a blatant reminder that when you bundle several services that rely on a single provider - when their service has a failure you get shut down on all fronts. Luckily, these days the phone component is not that big of an issue since most people have cell phones readily available. However, admittedly, losing cable television and internet at the same time is somewhat of a downer. Just be sure to keep a few good books on the shelf and you'll be fine during the few outages that are inherent with cable service.
Other than that single temporary outage, I have been very satisfied so far. Bundled service with a single bill, cheaper cost, and faster internet seems to outweigh the risk of downtime (assuming that risk remains relatively low). I am recommending this service to people at this point with the understanding that I have only had the service for only a couple of weeks. If things were to take a turn for the worse, I will certainly provide an update.
2 comments:
Thanks for the update. We were looking into it too.
Cancelled at&T, took Charter phone svc 04/2008. After claiming not doing so, Charter continued to run my calls through AT&T lines. AT&T billing me for $250 over months for long distance calls. Charter says send them bills and they'll handle. They have done nothing..have no supervisors you can speak with...corporate office is a telephone that no one answers and refuse to respond to left messages. AT&T says I cancelled local calling only and that long distance is another company. I have reported AT&T and Charter both to Public Service Commission. I know this will not result in any action, but also told AT&T collectors, NEVER, to call here again. Charter's customer service makes AT&T's look like a-one. I continue to use Charter (though I hate them) simply because I have no alternative for cable, phone & internet!
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