Charter, Take Two

Some of you may remember my last run in with Charter's Cable TV service. If not, I'll go over it briefly, but first, I'll note this was especially painful for me, because I have long been a proponent of the vastly superior nature of cable over satellite. Cable's bi-directional, high bandwidth, fiber driven network can run circles around satellite, and can certainly give AT&T's upcoming Project Lightspeed/U-Verse fiber-to-the-neighborhood a run for its money (I tend to be dubious about IPTV). But, here I am harping on why cable is the best presently available and yet can't get cable TV to work.

Charter installed Digital Cable last March at my home after they offered to make it worth my while to get a triple play (telephone/internet/video) from them, as opposed to just telephone and internet. Essentially, they offered to beat the price of Dish Network and throw in all the premium movie channels. Unfortunately, they installed a DVR (Moxi) which did not get along with analog channels, and channels 1-99 were still analog. After much ado and no solutions from Charter, I managed to get them to refund the half month of service “received” (albeit in an unusable form) and in the end, they did make it up with an additional credit and a 1 year price drop of $5 on the high speed internet.

So, fast forward to this week. As I understand it, sometime in recent months, Charter finally started up Digital Simutrans, the system by which they simultaneously send analog and digital signals of channels 1-99, allowing digital boxes, such as the Moxi to go “all digital.” Moreover, I spent time in the Ozarks, where the hotel rooms have cable TV; this leads me to want cable because cable, unlike Dish Network satellite, provides local weather on the 8's on the Weather Channel. Even worse, I've been itching to try again ever since I produced a 3 minute segment for Lindenwood's public access channel and was unable to watch it since satellites also do not get public access channels.

So, I called. And called again. And again. Charter has about as many different pricing schemes as Pizza Hut has pizza specials. Many of them were cheaper than Dish, but only until all the extras were added on. Finally, I pulled out my trump card: I had called AT&T and found out they were cheaper than Charter for a triple play of phone, internet and TV, and I let Charter know I was aware of that. Suddenly I had a wheeler dealer guy on the line who offered various “retention” incentives until the price ended up somewhere between $5-$10 cheaper than the current arrangement of phone and internet through Charter and TV through Dish Network. They also gave me free installation, which they insisted they did not offer any longer a few hours earlier, and all of the movie channels again.

Charter is coming to install the system on Monday. We'll see if it works this time.