We get our Internet and Cable TV from Charter Communications, and mostly the service is OK – except when it’s not.
We arrived home from work on Friday evening to fond no TV and no internet access. I am absolutely not an expert, but they signs were that our service was not arriving at our box, it seemed to me it was something outside the house.
I called Charter, and was told there was a general outage reported in out area, and that the good news was that the engineers were out right now looking at it – give it an hour – 90 minutes max, and we’d be back up.
Two hours later, and still no further forward, I called again, and this time was told, no- there is no report of any general outage – it must be your box, and “I can certainly fix that for you!” I did what I was told to do, but nothing worked. I mentioned again about our Internet, but was told that this was something totally different, that they would get an engineer round to look at the TV, and that he’d probably look at the internet router when he got there. The appointment was for Sunday afternoon.
I really didn’t believe that the two things were not connected, but in the end I called the internet help line too. They listened told me it was the router, and that they could certainly fix that for me. I’m guessing that some Corporate Director has sent out the instruction to always be positive that you can fix a problem, even when you have no idea.
So we did the re-boot thing, the turning everything off and waiting thing, but nothing worked, so he told me it was defiantly the router that had broken, and that the engineer on Sunday would put a new one in.
…
On Sunday, the engineer called, took one look at the signals on the router and TV and said that it must be something outside. After a while he came back in and told us the cause of the problem – our next door neighbors have just move out, and they disconnected their Charter Cable – only when the engineers came to do that, they turned ours off too!!!
To get everything back again took no time at all, and then he set about doing tests on the signal. Unfortunately the internet signal did not meet one of the tests, and so he asked if we minded if he moved the router to the other inlet we have, which happens to be in my office. We did that but it still failed. Then he said that the reason was we had a connector on the cable splitting the signal to the TV and the router – what would cure that was having a separate cable direct to the router.
I wasn’t keen on having another cable into the house, nor was I enamored with the other suggestion of disconnecting my office TV, and I was just about to agree to another hole being drilled in the wall, when I asked “are we sure this would work?” This was apparently a brilliant question, and the engineer attached the router directly to the cable, without a split connector, and it failed the test again.
After much more trying, he admitted defeat, and has reported a line fault – who knows when that will get fixed.
We have TV, we have internet, so what is the problem?
If that is our only problem, then we really don’t have any, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when customer service people are told to be SO positive they have the answers, when often they don’t. During the weekend I was talk that:
It was definitely an area outage – it wasn’t
It was definitely a problem with my cable box that could be fixed over the phone – it wasn’t
It was definitely a problem with my router that could be fixed over the phone – it wasn’t
It definitely could be cured by putting a new cable in to the house – it wasn’t
It looked to me like our service wasn’t coming into the house – and it turned out, it wasn’t!
Derek Knight 