So after crowing about the new speed of the Deauxmayne, I awoke Saturday morning to abysmal conditions on the downlink side — anywhere from a tenth to a third of my expected bandwidth. The uplink side was fine, so I doubt anyone really noticed the problem. From my office, however, it was bad, bad, bad.

I called Charter Business, and had someone on the phone in less than five minutes. We walked through some basic troubleshooting — most of which I’d already done — and it was determined that I needed a visit from a technician. This was about 11.30am, and I was told I’d have someone knocking on the Deauxmayne door between 1pm and 5pm.

Sure enough, right after 1pm, the Charter van pulled up, and the tech began doing his work, eliminating everything inside the house, and then eliminating everything outside the house. He left to go check another site, and called back an hour later letting me know the whole state was having a similar problem. That was good news — no problem on my end — but there was no ETA. Performance was pretty crummy the rest of the afternoon, and I never got a chance to check later to see if things were better.

Sunday morning, I got up, and the datarate was blazing fast again.

Folks ask why I pay a higher price for Charter’s business services, and this is exactly why. It’s to quibble with initial response times like I had in this event, and with follow-up calls to keep me in the loop on the resolution. In five years, this is only the second time I’ve had problems with the service, and both times, I had resolution very quickly.

Way to go Charter… Now, if only the TV side worked as well. 🙂