Charter Continues To Charge Wildfire Victims For Service They Don’t Have

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The one thing you can always count on from your internet service provider is that your bill will always be on time, regardless whether or not you have service....or a house for that matter. :(

Charter cable and internet customers in Tennessee who recently lost their homes to wildfire say the pay-TV giant, which recently merged with Time Warner Cable, is continuing to charge them for services that they can’t possibly access, and to return equipment that no longer exists. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that it’s not just the burned-down homes that are racking up Charter bills; some homes that survived last month’s wildfire are being charged for cable and internet even though the company has yet to restore service.
 
“We were told that if we dig through the rubble and found parts of the equipment, we could bring it in as proof. Otherwise, we couldn’t prove that the equipment was in the cabin at the time of the fire, and would be charged 100% for all Charter equipment.”

Stay classy Charter
 
Ha! It will take about 6 different technicians to come on out to the residence explaining to you that the coax connections are corroded due to water damage and they will forward up to their next tier for service refund actions whilst dismissing the fact that there is a burnt out husk of a home 2 inches away... Meanwhile... What coax connections???? It all burned! (Including the infrastructure!) Sorry.... did not mean to get on a soapbox "Spectrum" is horrible period.
 
A lot of click bait there.

It says in the article that Charter has said it will not charge for specific residents affected, but the article is bitching about Charter not having an automatic system that just knows when someone's house is destroyed. It also complains that Charter wants the cable box back before canceling an account.

It's unfortunate that these things happen, but the rest of the world keeps moving on. Just because these people's lives came to a grinding halt, doesn't mean everything else did.
 
I think it's more than a little ridiculous that they know the second you go over you data cap 1MB, but don't use a single Kb because your box is disconnected and the cable connecting it is moltan slag and suddenly they don't know what's going on.
 
How would they know that? They would have to know address by address. Just because you don't use the service doesn't mean you aren't paying for the possibility of using it.

I'm sure if these residence simply call them, it will get worked out on a case by case situation.
 
Over reacting to a non issue is so fun and fulfilling. I am off to my anti cable company safe zone.
 
couldn't you just take a picture of the smoldering crater that was your home as proof?

fuck me. that's evil.
 
How would they know that? They would have to know address by address. Just because you don't use the service doesn't mean you aren't paying for the possibility of using it.

I'm sure if these residence simply call them, it will get worked out on a case by case situation.


...Cable companies know when their service is down, it's not like they are oblivious to outages and don't know when their customers have service or might not.
 
who would have thought that someone could get lower then Comcast.

Nah, Comcast has done the same thing. This isn't even the first time for TWC. Before Charter bought them TWC pulled the same crap after Hurricane Sandy. Chater's CS is abysmal, TWC's CS was also reportedly abysmal. The reps are poorly trained, incredibly constrained, and not really paid enough to care. No idea how TWC trained their CSRs but I doubt it was much better.
 
Charter has record of the cable boxes on the account.

There are also detailed maps of the affected areas that are publicly available, because of search and recuse crews that searched each home in the area for damage, remains, and survivors.

Their infrastructure in most of the area is destroyed. They are just being ignorant, and playing the "we didn't know" card. Now that they are being called out publicly about this, you better believe there will be a "we're sorry" statement coming out soon. any they'll give everyone 1 month credit to use on future services.
 
I can confirm this one personally. At one of the offices I support in Gatlinburg (that burned), Charter has continued to charge them at their old address (which burned) and they have tried asking for equipment to be returned. They are also still charging one of the women who work there (whose home did not burn, though many of her neighbors did) even though she has had no phone, internet, or cable since the fire. A lot of this has to do with none of their billing/customer service people even being located in this state -- you are talking to a call center in Timbuktu and they have no clue about the fires and several they spoke with acted like we were trying to lie to them to get out of paying our bill. I think they finally managed to get things straightened out at the office, but we won't know for sure until we get the next bill. Sadly, we had to go with Charter at the new address we relocated to, as there is no other option available other than AT&T DSL, which is slower than molasses in January (especially on the uplink side, which we need for our interoffice VPN).
 
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This kind of thing doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't be hard for them to add code in to check modems every day or so to see if it's active. If in an area more than a specific amount of modems suddenly go dark then a flag should be triggered in their system that maybe something is wrong and until it can be investigated for an outage billing should be suspended until those accounts are registering a signal again. That's how a cable company would make good news for once.
 
who would have thought that someone could get lower then Comcast.

I do IT support for numerous businesses in the East TN area -- including several in Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg -- and, yes, it is possible to be lower than Comcast.

Based on years of experience and having to deal with them all, I sadly hate to admit that Comcast has the best actual service (speed, reliability, et al), better than average technicians, worse than average phone based technical support, and average customer service compared to the others in this area.

Charter's actual service probably comes in second, with their customer service being maybe a hair worse than Comcast's -- but, thus far, most of their installers that I have dealt with have been way worse. I think they have screwed up every installation I've had to deal with them on.

AT&T seems to manage to somehow be worse than Comcast in just about every respect locally -- except perhaps in their billing department, they at least usually charge the amount we are expecting (which is one of the area's Comcast is worst at).

TDS is hit or miss -- if you have fiber access in your area, they are fantastic, but if you are in one of the older service areas....not so much. Their customer service has been just as bad as everyone else's seems to be.

Frontier I haven't had to deal with recently (thankfully), but they have some of the slowest speeds around, charge more for them, and seem to be always pushing their crappy McAfee based "support plan" on you at every chance, and if you don't have it, they invariably blame any service problems on viruses on your machine and then refuse to admit fault until you purchase their service plan. I've had several people, mainly elderly, get snared by this locally. The last time I had to deal with them on the phone personally, it took 30 minutes on the phone before the service agent ever figured out that they actually even offered service in East TN and where they needed to route me to.

WoW (nee Knology) is somewhat bargain basement, but at least used to be cheaper than Comcast/Charter. I've never been really impressed with them and nothing I've seen lately has done much to improve that. They haven't expanded their service area or apparently done much in the way of system improvements in years locally (since, if memory serves, they got caught by Knox County cherry picking neighborhoods that had high volumes of profitable add-on services and skipping over providing service to regions that were primarily just basic cable -- and I have no idea how the legal morass of that mess ever got sorted out).


Comcast I have to give some credit: their technicians/installers (around here) are usually pretty savvy, know their jobs, and are generally helpful (and often will do a lot of additional cabling, end replacement, fittings, etc. that they don't have to without charging anything beyond the initial service call).

The two areas where Comcast is worst are in the billing department and in the phone based tech support department -- both are absolutely horrendous. I have yet to have Comcast EVER get the services order and billing information done correctly over the phone. NOT. EVER. This also means that getting the account provisioning setup properly is almost always a nightmare -- and the really sad part of this is that they now make their installers have to deal with the same idiots to get things provisioned. I've listened to their installers on the phone with these guys literally yelling at them, telling them what they need to do step by step, and they STILL manage to screw it up. The only saving grace here has been that, on the billing side, they have two physical offices locally in Knoxville and I know of two different clerks (one at each office) who know what they are doing, know how to navigate the system, and have always been able to fix any billing issues within a few minutes or less. I have also managed to get my hands on the numbers that always connects me to their US based tech support team and have figured out which representative there actually knows what the heck he is doing and have figured out the right questions to ask to get routed to him. My other criticism here of Comcast would be with regards to their Business Voice Edge phone team's sales group -- whom will do almost anything to close a deal and whom have promised things to offices locally (specifically regarding HIPAA) that were not the case (and then had Comcast's own legal team later get back with us and nix the deal after we called their hand). I can say nothing positive or negative about the actual BVE service itself, but the BVE sales team ranks right up there with used car salesmen, in my opinion.


So, grudgingly, I typically recommend Comcast to most of my customer in the area -- because the others are all worse to deal with in some respect.
This is not to say Comcast is good -- I'd about rather gouge my eyes out than have to spend the afternoon arguing with the phone based billing department -- it's just that everybody else is worse.

If Comcast want's truth in advertising, they just need to put up a sign that says "We Suck Less".
 
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After Katrina we had no power for over a month and charter was down for about 3 months....charter still sent my parents a bill and even late charges for not paying it on time. Companys don't care if the lines are down they will still send you a bill till you bitch about it
 
They would commit murder if it made them money and they didn't get punished if they were caught.
 
How could they know? Well, if the modem on the account doesn't respond for one. Fire happened on XYZ date and look the modem(s) lost signal - conveniently in a big neighborhood sized clump - at the same XYZ date as well. If the ISP really wants to know, they'll know.

Bottom line, the attitude with most big corps or businesses is always, if even just one person keeps paying while the other 99.9% complain and don't pay, they are still making money off that one sucker that didn't have the balls to complain about it. Always err on the side of profit. Always.
 
Wow every one complains about something they know nothing about. The billing system in these large corporations is not linked to the system that knows your equipment is off line or online , or sitting in a box some where. The billing system is just that a billing system. It bills you. Just like your cell phone. You don't use it all month , guess what your still getting a bill. You have to call in and tell some one your not using something for them to know your not using it. Is that a pain in the some times sure. Does it suck you more then likely have to talk to some one over seas , yes it does. But your not going to get your bill stopped or get a credit on something with out telling some one you have a problem. That's like complaining about how bad your service with a company is to every one , but never calling the company to fix it. Oh wait that's what this article is all about. It's just click bait plus people complaining about getting a bill they never called in to say hey my house burned down or my service is out. Again billing systems have no way of knowing your stuff isn't working..
 
So telling a customer that they need to find the charred remains of the equipment or they will be charged is ok? That is reason to be pissed. When you contact them and explain the situation and they do shit like that.
 
This kind of thing doesn't surprise me. It wouldn't be hard for them to add code in to check modems every day or so to see if it's active. If in an area more than a specific amount of modems suddenly go dark then a flag should be triggered in their system that maybe something is wrong and until it can be investigated for an outage billing should be suspended until those accounts are registering a signal again. That's how a cable company would make good news for once.

To piggy back off of what lostsouls said, this system already exists. As someone who worked with them (and left right before the merger, it was shit and could bee seen a mile away, many of us left before it became final) I can confirm that after a certain period (it used to be 24 hours, could have changed) the CMTS knows and marks in Arris when a device is 100% offline. This info is passed through the whole Arris system and is used to measure the metric "Node Health". For an individual's house this isn't acted on until a future service call deems necessary but it will be reflected to the maintenance techs (the bucket truck guys) if it gets too high per node, this is also how they can track outages if they know what to look for. It's handy for tracking down bridger amps or nodes with FEC on them. When enough go down, trust me, someone knows.

but, like lost said, these issues are all kept in the Arris platform, the billing system is 100% it's own thing, all the billing system looks at is the account codes for the services you have. It's can't see into Arris and see the equipment status. That's why even if you disconnect the phone modem but have phone service, as long as that code is there (the codes tell the equipment how to work) the billing system will see that and still bill you for the phone line. On the flip side if the techs ran out of normal modems and gave you an EMTA with the phone in it, if you only have the code for the internet the phone won't turn on, so the billing is only looking at service codes, not equipment or status. Now should there be a department that looks at them and sees that there's an outage and credit accounts? Maybe, but that would have to be more in depth then that, people could spoof machines offline and just get credit every month and cheat the system.

I don't see what the big evil is here. Sure, it's a shit company and that's why I left, but honestly there has to be some responsibility on the customer to manage their own lives. And I promise you, anyone that calls in, all they'll need is one super to get them credit for the time lost back to their account, and as for the equipment, claims WILL waive those if you're house was burned or for some act of god you can't recover the equipment, and they will also take back destroyed equipment. Seen it multiple times.

couldn't you just take a picture of the smoldering crater that was your home as proof?

fuck me. that's evil.

Actually, yes, as long as you get in touch with a super this can be done exactly like this lol, I did it once for a customer. Was sent out to disco someone and when I got there there was just a huge rubble filled crater and one very melted plastic mower shed to it. In about 15 minutes I was able to get the account noted for refund and also got the equipment marked as destroyed.

Cable sucks yea, but it's a lot easier to work with then people think, and trust me, most the customers I've met, they were the hard part of the equation.
 
Charter could easily have generated some good PR buzz by being on top of this and reaching out through mobile phones/facebook/twitter to see if their customers are ok.

But nope. Its all about maximum profit.
 
They'd be a great deal more responsive if so many people didn't set up auto-pay on their accounts. This is why companies "accidentally" fail to notice that service is down. Even if they have to refund people who complain later, the money from the ones who don't complain is worth the hassle. As a bonus, since (as has been pointed out) they actually do have records of who lost service, they can probably count those "losses" when it comes time to account for subscribers to the content providers.
 
How would they know that? They would have to know address by address. Just because you don't use the service doesn't mean you aren't paying for the possibility of using it.

I'm sure if these residence simply call them, it will get worked out on a case by case situation.

My dad had Dish. He died. I called Dish and told them he had died and to cancel his service - he wouldn't be needing it or paying for it and I had no problem returning their gear. They never would cancel it, even when his bill got up to over $600. When I was closing out his estate, I had the attorney write a letter and a couple of days later a gear return box showed up at his place and was blown off the porch and buried by a blizzard. I finally saw it after the snow melted back a little and sent the stuff to them.

But seriously, how far in arrears would you need to be for some of these bozos to just cancel your service? The other utilities wait about a month and bam.
 
Unless charter changed the policy 3 months. You get shut off at that point. That's why in a lot of low income places you have to provide an ID and techs will actually check it, I can't tell you how many times I've seen accounts made in kids names and they run it for 3 months then sign up another kid, rinse wash repeat. I think 3 months is a bit too long but 1 month is too short, 2 seems ideal to me
 
couldn't you just take a picture of the smoldering crater that was your home as proof?

fuck me. that's evil.

I wouldn't accept that. I would on the other hand accept a government document or a letter from your home owners insurance showing an inspection found such damage.
 
Charter could easily have generated some good PR buzz by being on top of this and reaching out through mobile phones/facebook/twitter to see if their customers are ok.

But nope. Its all about maximum profit.

You don't need good pr when you are the only game in town for most of your customers. Reasonable service at a reasonable price + a little extra because they can, is all very good.
 
but honestly there has to be some responsibility on the customer to manage their own lives. And I promise you, anyone that calls in, all they'll need is one super to get them credit for the time lost back to their account, and as for the equipment, claims WILL waive those if you're house was burned or for some act of god you can't recover the equipment, and they will also take back destroyed equipment. Seen it multiple times.
I don't know about you, but if I just lost my house in a wildfire; the last thing I'll be thinking about is my cable company :)
btw see the quote I quoted, seems buddy did call in, they said "start digging".
If you live in the affected area rather then making you go through bullshit, they should make a show of good faith and and just accept anyone saying it's gone. Retail has to deal with 10%, Charter can take a few for the team (and get some goodwill out of it).
 
I don't know about you, but if I just lost my house in a wildfire; the last thing I'll be thinking about is my cable company :)
btw see the quote I quoted, seems buddy did call in, they said "start digging".
If you live in the affected area rather then making you go through bullshit, they should make a show of good faith and and just accept anyone saying it's gone. Retail has to deal with 10%, Charter can take a few for the team (and get some goodwill out of it).


First, I am sorry about all the loss and hassle you must have had to deal with. But at some point someone had to have asked you about canceling your utilities or you must have thought of it yourself. How long did it take before that subject came up, as best you can remember?

I mean it's not just your cable company, it's electric, water, all of it soooo, it adds up.
 
Oh, I live in southern Alberta I dodged the wildfire that happened up north :)

I did say if
 
I will start by saying that forcing a return of equipment vs forcing a charge for not returning equipment is two different things. If they are actually forcing a return of equipment to turn off service vs saying that you will be charged for not returning equipment that fucked up.

With that out of the way. Just because you lost the equipment in a fire doesn't mean you don't still owe for it. That is what insurance is for.

I know it is a horrible way to look at it, but it isn't charter's (or any other service provider that leases you equipment) fault that your house burnt down nor their job to care that it burnt down. If you are leasing a car and your house burns down would you be pissed off that you still owe on the car lease or that they want the car back?

If your house burns down either partly or completely it is your responsibility to contact all your service providers and either put your account on hold or cancel it. If you need to return equipment and can't then you should expect to get charged for that and need to file that along with everything else to your insurance company.

I know that it makes companies look horrible for wanting to be paid but they have to stick to their ground somehow. If you burn your box you get out of paying for it, but if you spill a beer on it while drunk you have to pay, or your child knocks it off the shelf and it breaks you pay, or it just stops working you pay.. So why wouldn't everyone just take it outside and burn the unit and then say it doesn't work because it was in a fire. you can't charge in some cases and then in others let it go.
 
To piggy back off of what lostsouls said, this system already exists. As someone who worked with them (and left right before the merger, it was shit and could bee seen a mile away, many of us left before it became final) I can confirm that after a certain period (it used to be 24 hours, could have changed) the CMTS knows and marks in Arris when a device is 100% offline. This info is passed through the whole Arris system and is used to measure the metric "Node Health". For an individual's house this isn't acted on until a future service call deems necessary but it will be reflected to the maintenance techs (the bucket truck guys) if it gets too high per node, this is also how they can track outages if they know what to look for. It's handy for tracking down bridger amps or nodes with FEC on them. When enough go down, trust me, someone knows.

but, like lost said, these issues are all kept in the Arris platform, the billing system is 100% it's own thing, all the billing system looks at is the account codes for the services you have. It's can't see into Arris and see the equipment status. That's why even if you disconnect the phone modem but have phone service, as long as that code is there (the codes tell the equipment how to work) the billing system will see that and still bill you for the phone line. On the flip side if the techs ran out of normal modems and gave you an EMTA with the phone in it, if you only have the code for the internet the phone won't turn on, so the billing is only looking at service codes, not equipment or status. Now should there be a department that looks at them and sees that there's an outage and credit accounts? Maybe, but that would have to be more in depth then that, people could spoof machines offline and just get credit every month and cheat the system.

I don't see what the big evil is here. Sure, it's a shit company and that's why I left, but honestly there has to be some responsibility on the customer to manage their own lives. And I promise you, anyone that calls in, all they'll need is one super to get them credit for the time lost back to their account, and as for the equipment, claims WILL waive those if you're house was burned or for some act of god you can't recover the equipment, and they will also take back destroyed equipment. Seen it multiple times.



Actually, yes, as long as you get in touch with a super this can be done exactly like this lol, I did it once for a customer. Was sent out to disco someone and when I got there there was just a huge rubble filled crater and one very melted plastic mower shed to it. In about 15 minutes I was able to get the account noted for refund and also got the equipment marked as destroyed.

Cable sucks yea, but it's a lot easier to work with then people think, and trust me, most the customers I've met, they were the hard part of the equation.

Just to add to this as a previous Charter Tech Support employee. Just call in and they can do a damage claim on the equipment and you can probably put a hold on your services or shut it off until they get service up in the area. They guarantee you 70% SLA. If your in that area then your SLA is 0% right now and you arent getting what you pay for. They know that but you cant just pick and choose custom areas in your billing system and just turn them off. Its not made to work like that. Just like its also not made to proactively find problems. If your modem is offline you cant expect a company to pay people to monitor KMAs with that amount of detail as well as paying tech support to call the customer to ask them if their service is working as well as paying techs driving around tweaking nodes and replacing lines. Costs to much money and the logistics dont work. Your service is down you call them. Squeeky wheel gets the grease. The system checks provisioning with the billing system as said above. Thats about as close as the billing and network talk to each other.

I dealt with this on numerous occasions as a tech support rep there. I never told anyone to "Start Digging". I escalated a ticket up regarding their equipment damage due to natural disaster and they usually got taken care of. Expecting a company to be proactive on something that its not built or made to be able to do is hilarious.
 
Just to add to this as a previous Charter Tech Support employee. Just call in and they can do a damage claim on the equipment and you can probably put a hold on your services or shut it off until they get service up in the area. They guarantee you 70% SLA. If your in that area then your SLA is 0% right now and you arent getting what you pay for. They know that but you cant just pick and choose custom areas in your billing system and just turn them off. Its not made to work like that. Just like its also not made to proactively find problems. If your modem is offline you cant expect a company to pay people to monitor KMAs with that amount of detail as well as paying tech support to call the customer to ask them if their service is working as well as paying techs driving around tweaking nodes and replacing lines. Costs to much money and the logistics dont work. Your service is down you call them. Squeeky wheel gets the grease. The system checks provisioning with the billing system as said above. Thats about as close as the billing and network talk to each other.

I dealt with this on numerous occasions as a tech support rep there. I never told anyone to "Start Digging". I escalated a ticket up regarding their equipment damage due to natural disaster and they usually got taken care of. Expecting a company to be proactive on something that its not built or made to be able to do is hilarious.

The Tech's haven't been the problem -- it's been the billing department. As you have confirmed, the billing department obviously has essentially no contact with anyone technical around this area -- which is all that would be required to at least have a pretty good idea of which service areas burned or were "out of commission" for the moment. Instead, I personally know people and/or business owners whom have told me that, upon calling in, they have been essentially treated as if they were lying to get out of paying their bill, been told they were under still under contract and couldn't cancel their service without paying a cancellation fee, or been told that they still needed to return the equipment or they would be billed for it. I also know of a woman at one of the offices I support who has not had home phone, internet, or cable since the night of the fire and no one has been willing to even given an estimate of when service will be restored -- but she has been told that if they don't pay the bill then their service may be cancelled and/or not restored. From what she told me, they essentially told her that she needed to keep paying the bill in full until such time as service was restored and then call in again (for another multi-hour phone call) and they would probably give her a credit to her account for the days that service was unavailable. Would it be too much to expect for them to place the account on hold until their own technical department notifies them that service has been restored to the area? Though that would require the different divisions to actually talk to each other -- which obviously is never going to happen.....

I suspect a lot of this has to do with the fact that the billing department call center is nowhere near here and a lot of the reps don't appear to have even heard about the fire (or care).

On this though, management could have and should have been proactive. There are over 2000 homes and businesses around here that burned, it would not have taken rocket science for someone at Charter to think to just send a notice to the billing department letting them know the affected area and then flagged accounts that were potentially involved. All it would have taken was one little memo telling about the fire, giving them the affected zip code, etc. and instructions to give these customers the benefit of the doubt -- or they could have automatically placed a lot of these accounts on billing hold until it's all sorted out.

A lot of this has to do with what happens when companies get way too big and start using national call centers, or worse, offshoring to international call centers, for all billing questions.

I also suspect that a lot of this also has to do with Charter knowing that there is effectively no other option other than for people to put up with them if they want service, as the only other options at our office are MUCH slower and the phone service is WAY more expensive.

In other words, they don't really care about the bad PR, because it's not like there is really any other viable option around Gatlinburg.

So...as we had no real choice, we ended up going with Charter again at the new office location (in a building about a half mile closer to downtown, in one of the areas largely unaffected by the fire).
And even then, for the lobby TV, they left the wrong cable box, we had to send someone to pickup the correct cable box, they failed to activate that cable box, then when we called in over the phone to get it activated, we were routed to an automated message stating that there were service outages in our area and to try again later (no duh, a lot of the area still doesn't have service), even though our actual location was one that has never been affected. It didn't get fixed until they sent out a service tech to install our fax line (which had gotten left off the original order -- that mistake's on us, not them).

The only thing I can say in Charter's defense is that pretty much all of the other cable/phone companies suck too -- just in different ways. Some are better, some are worse, but they all still suck when held to any reasonable definition of customer service.

Sadly, as I have to deal with them a lot down in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge area, I have to admit that Comcast's billing department is even worse to deal with than Charter's is -- but their actual service and their technicians are MUCH better (though the odds are next to nil of getting a bill that looks even remotely like what you were actually promised the services would cost). So, I usually recommend Comcast as they have the best service in Knoxville, assuming you can actually get the order placed properly -- just try to avoid EVER changing anything once it's up and working, as they invariably screw it up when you do. Most of my experiences with getting contracts changed at Comcast have almost always ended in disaster and some have taken up to 8 hours of phone time to get straightened out (as for business services they won't let you go in-store to make changes, which always works better for fixing home services billing/provisioning issues). Most of the time, dealing with Comcast's Business contract division makes me feel like Lando dealing with Vader: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
 
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Did you even read what i posted at all?

Yes, I did read what your wrote -- which is why I said exactly what I did.

And saying "your service is down, call them" to put your service on hold is a total cop out -- especially for people who have no home, no home phone, cellular service that had been spotty for the first few days after the fire (they seemed to get that fixed quickly at least), no records of their account #, no previous bills, no saved passwords, often no computers or laptops or access to email, etc. -- this makes it really fun to try calling in to customer service and putting your account on hold (from a phone # that doesn't match your service location).

And even for those that did call in, part of the issue is that, based on comments I have heard, some of them were, at least initially, being treated as if they were trying to scam Charter out of paying their bill and no one on the other end seemed to have had the slightest clue about the fires even having happened.

When you have a disaster of this magnitude that makes the national news, it is not too much to expect some mid-level manager at Charter to take an hour and identify those accounts potentially affected and notify the billing department to be ready for them -- or, better yet, to proactively send a notice to put those accounts on hold automatically until service is restored. Yes, this may take a little extra time and may cost them a little money -- but when compared to the cost in lives and property already lost in Gatlinburg it is a paltry pittance to pay to help avoid adding insult to injury on people who are already suffering. And, while, yes, I fully understand that the billing and technical departments have no contact day-to-day except for provisioning, it is not too much to expect them to assign someone to "bridge the gap" between the two departments following a crisis or disaster.

That said, Charter had to be granted a license to provide service in Gatlinburg/Sevier County and rights for pole access -- and, as such, they are essentially treated as a utility with near monopoly status (and, as a phone service physical transport provider, they should be treated as a utility).

As Knology found out in Knoxville in years past, these rights and licenses are subject to review by the county (especially when they do things like allegedly trying to expand only into lucrative affluent neighborhoods in Farragut, while delaying/avoiding providing service to the eastern part of the county).

In my opinion, the next time their license is up for review, Sevier County should take a good hard look at how Charter responded to the situation in Gatlinburg and possibly evaluate if some other carrier might offer to do a better job in the future.
 
They better do that to all utilities then and to all the people who lost cell phones in their homes, all the people who lost their cars but didn't have coverage, they should just kick all those evil companies out, they town can invent all of their own utilities!

Come on man, While it sounds good on paper if they tried to start this it would be a nightmare logistically, because as soon as you do an automated something for one the entire country wants in on it and will complain (this thread for example) the second they don't feel like the world is fair.

Spoiler alert, it's not.
 
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