Following my hissy fit the other night Woody alerted me that Charter has also lept on the cable monopoly bandwagon of capping customer data. It's a doomed fight, but in the short run I expect the cable monopolies to do a lot of damage aping the blinkered approach of the music companies in the face of the digitization of their business model, flailing around blindly like a drowning swimmer.
I'll probably switch anyway. We had Charter at our old place for 5-odd years with no complaints aside from stupid pricing (ten bucks a month surcharge for NOT having cable teevee? GTFO.) But I can count on one hand the number of times service was down for more than a few minutes, and one of them was caused by my modem physically failing after years of loyal service. Our DSL craps out several times a week. I can usually fix it with a modem reboot & comp restart, but it's be REALLY NICE if it just worked without a bunch of coddling on our end. And it periodically just takes a crap for days at a time, and God help anyone who ventures into ATT's Customer Abuse system. Their robot 'helper' is so obtuse it makes you pine for the good old days of minimum wage barely intelligible Indian call center support.
Running the numbers, Charter's 'base' plan offers a measly 100 gigs, which is insufficient. 'Plus' and 'Max' jump that up to 250 gigs, which would probably work great. We tripped over 150 gigs on the 25th, so 250 seems safe.
Our DSL right now is the bottom tier $20 a month plan, but it looks like they're shoving everyone into their stupid U-VERSE! program, which doubles the price with no perceptible benefit- I've already got a wireless home network, thanks.
So, $48 bucks a month for ATT with a 150g cap and crappy, spotty service vs $40 a month for Charter with a 250g cap and rock solid service.
Easy call.
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