In Search of a Cable TV Provider

If you have been following this blog recently,  you know that a couple of months ago I moved from Oceanside, California, which has a population of about 183,000 people to Covington, Georgia with a population less than 1/10th that size.  I do not regret the move; however there have been some services that I wanted that seem to be … how shall I say it…difficult to obtain here.

When I was in Oceanside, my cable provider was Cox Communications.  They provided cable TV, Internet and phone service to me.  On the whole, my experience with Cox Communications was a very positive one and, quite frankly, they have set the standard.  Prior to moving here, I contacted Charter Communications to set up my services in my new home.  My reason for choosing Charter?  Cox and Comcast were not available in my area.  Now, my daughter, who also lives in this area, strongly suggested that I not use Charter because of her previous bad experiences with the cable company.  I assured her that it was unlikely that I would have a similar experience.  Unfortunately I was wrong.

The technology I wanted in my new home is called “whole house DVR.”  This technology allows one to record a program and watch it in any room in the house.  This feature is very important to me because it allows my wife and I to watch separate and different programming or to start to watch a program in one room and finish watching it in another room.  And when I contacted Charter Communications, they assured me that they had this technology and would have no problem installing it in my house.  So with Charter’s assurances, I ordered the service and expected installation to occur the day after our furniture arrived.

When the Charter technician arrived on the big day, he said that he did not have the equipment promised and Charter would put me on a waiting list. He then offered to install two DVR recorders and two standard cable boxes while I waited for my name to come to the top of the queue.  My disappointment was a massive, but I allowed the technician to install this equipment after calling the local office and being assured the equipment would be available within two days.  I was prepared to chalk this up to experience except that night the hard drive in the DVR  in the master bedroom spun so loudly, it sounded like a CH-46 helicopter taking off.  After two nights of unplugging the DVR so that we could sleep, I called Charter Communications and told them that I wanted their DVR system out of my house. When they asked me to reconsider because they were sure the equipment I wanted would be available next week; I reminded them they’d said it would be available today.

Silence.

Then we both agreed, Charter wasn’t going to meet my needs and setup a date for disconnection of cable TV services. So with my hat in hand, I went to my daughter and I asked her what cable service she was currently using. She said Dish Network.  So I bit the bullet and got Dish Network satellite TV and have never looked back.  Charter still provides my phone service and my Internet, but I have learned my lesson about those guys.  Now, I am sure that there are people who are happy with Charter TV, but I’m not one of them.  I will just chalk this up as another in my recent Georgia learning experiences.