Charter Spectrum?

[chronical]

I currently have Uverse 18mb dl and 1.5mb ul for $50 a month. Charter Spectrum offers 100mb dl and 20mg ul for the same price. My Uverse blows and every time I call to complain about it, it gets dismissed as having too many devices on it.

Well fuck, I can't help that. TV's are smart, laptops and desktops are wireless, smart phones, xbox, the damn thermostat even.

I need to be capable of watching Netflix while a couple phones and maybe a xbox are connected.

Would Spectrum meet my needs?

[Gasser64]

It will do all that no problem. I love charter spectrum. The 100mbps is often 110 if you look at the speed when actually downloading. Steam shows it for example, and a few other things do as well. But if you visit certain sites, and perhaps sometimes download certain things, you will need a VPN with charter specturm for sure. Otherwise, hypothetically speaking, they may be inclined to send you certain notices. Constantly.

[Chili]

We had the Spectrum 100mbps plan for the last couple of years. We usually saw between 20-30mbps download but sometimes it would dip down to 10 or below, which I would see when I noticed that streaming would lose quality or start buffering. It was adequate at least, but then AT&T fiber came to our neighborhood.

We're on a 1,000mbps plan with them for the exact same price as we paid Spectrum, and are usually maxing out our wireless cards. For our older computers that's between 100 and 200mbps. My Pixel 2 constantly pulls 300-500mbps, and the laptop plugged into the modem via LAN is over 900mbps.

Spectrum is a PITA to return equipment, that's for sure. Leah ended up going 2 or 3 times, and the line is apparently regularly over an hour long.

[Chili]

I should add, we had uverse before Spectrum, and Spectrum was definitely better than uverse.

Of course I think your neighborhood, how many users on the same line, how far you are from the thingamajig and all that are factors. At least from what I was told then.

[The King]

We've been running at about 70 mbs with Spectrum when I check the wireless speed through an iPhone, versus the 12 mbs we might have received (on a good day) with u-Verse. That's typically been with a couple of SlingTV devices and laptops/iPhones running wi-fi simultaneously. Spectrum has been the best option for us in our area, and we have no complaints thus far after about a year of internet only service.

I bought my own compatible Cisco modem and a TP-Link router from Amazon. Like Chili posted though, returning leased equipment was always a PITA as I recall years ago when we had Time Warner.

[BP]

Spectrum is a PITA to return equipment, that's for sure. Leah ended up going 2 or 3 times, and the line is apparently regularly over an hour long.

There are usually 1-2 people in the store on Hulen when I go, which is either first thing in the morning on a Saturday or during a lunch break in the week. I've had to swap 5 boxes so far though and will be doing a 6th today. Their DVR boxes SUCK!

As for internet it's great. I get 110-116 down and 11-14 up all the time with a 6ms ping. They are also doubling the speed in the next few months on the base package.

[The King]

There are usually 1-2 people in the store on Hulen when I go, which is either first thing in the morning on a Saturday or during a lunch break in the week. I've had to swap 5 boxes so far though and will be doing a 6th today. Their DVR boxes SUCK!

As for internet it's great. I get 110-116 down and 11-14 up all the time with a 6ms ping. They are also doubling the speed in the next few months on the base package.

I wonder what the issue is with their DVRs? I have had a TiVO DVR for years and it still works flawlessly for off-the-air recording.

[kingjason]

There are usually 1-2 people in the store on Hulen when I go, which is either first thing in the morning on a Saturday or during a lunch break in the week. I've had to swap 5 boxes so far though and will be doing a 6th today. Their DVR boxes SUCK!

As for internet it's great. I get 110-116 down and 11-14 up all the time with a 6ms ping. They are also doubling the speed in the next few months on the base package.

Yeah my DVR box and my modem were both having issues but they swapped them out. They would randomly black out right in the middle of something. Works great now.

[BP]

I wonder what the issue is with their DVRs? I have had a TiVO DVR for years and it still works flawlessly for off-the-air recording.

They pushed out a software update a few months ago and it messed up the hard drive controllers. With the boxes powered off but still plugged in the hard drives will keep spinning up constantly which of course kills the drives. I couldn't stand the noise so I had a tech come out and replace 3 of my 4 tuners, he only had 3 on the truck. I replaced the 4th a couple of weeks ago when it lost all audio. I'm going back today to replace another one that has an intermittent picture.

So it's partially poor software engineering and probably mostly due to some pretty low quality reconditioning of their boxes.

When I had TWC in Temple they just gave me a decoder box, not a huge ass tuner. I didn't have DVR service though. I'd imagine their long term goal is to move everyone over to that type of setup, either that or to use an app on your own device with a cloud based DVR. So they really don't care about spending a ton of money on existing equipment.

[kingjason]

Guy told me they had completely new boxes in another part of the country, just not here yet.

[Gasser64]

We had the Spectrum 100mbps plan for the last couple of years. We usually saw between 20-30mbps download but sometimes it would dip down to 10 or below, which I would see when I noticed that streaming would lose quality or start buffering. It was adequate at least, but then AT&T fiber came to our neighborhood.

We're on a 1,000mbps plan with them for the exact same price as we paid Spectrum, and are usually maxing out our wireless cards. For our older computers that's between 100 and 200mbps. My Pixel 2 constantly pulls 300-500mbps, and the laptop plugged into the modem via LAN is over 900mbps.

Spectrum is a PITA to return equipment, that's for sure. Leah ended up going 2 or 3 times, and the line is apparently regularly over an hour long.

I had the opposite experience. That ATT fiber stuff just didn't work out for me. Always one problem or another. They came and installed the line through my yard. They just used a shovel and parted the grass, and stuffed the line down into the crack. But yeah looks like it just varies depending on where you are, how good or bad the service ends up being.

As for returning charter's equipment, they just sent me a box to put the stuff in, the last time I cancelled. Wanted to try ATT fiber. I just took the box to the post office and that was that. I guess up there in the big city, they want you to just hand it over to them so they don't have to pay shipping.

[BP]

Guy told me they had completely new boxes in another part of the country, just not here yet.

TWC customers in many markets have the "worldbox". It's a whole house DVR setup like Dish and Direct have but with considerably less storage. I really hope that's not what they are rolling out nationwide.

[jtotin]

I use ATT fiber. 1,000 megs a second look in to it.


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[Sgt Beavis]

CenturyLink Gbit Fiber here. I can't say enough about how damn solid it has been.

Well with one exception. Their router is crap. It has an ancient arm processor that can't handle crap. I upgraded to an ASUS unit with a lot more memory and processing power. I tested it out with three TVs and four other devices streaming movies at the same time while I ran a VDI session over VPN in my lab.

It ran like a champ.

[BP]

Btw I swapped another box yesterday at the Hulen location and there was literally 1 other customer in the store. It took about two minutes at 12:45.