Charter Communications Business

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calvinj

[H]ard|Gawd
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Wondering if anybody had an experience with Charter Communications Business specifically in the Riverside CA area? We currently have AT&T out there and just not impressed by the lack of communication with our "account rep" (if that's what you want to call him).

I understand it's a sales driven world that we live in, but that's all they are concerned about. They were answering the phone right away when they had a potential sale, but after found out we were going to wait on upgrading the service out there we haven't heard from them since.

Anyways I noticed Charter Communications can offer business class fiber and ethernet products as well as voice so I was wondering if anybody has used them and what kind of luck they have had. Tell it to me good or bad.
 
Um, if you told your "account rep" you weren't going to buy anything, why would you need constant communication with him?

After the existing circuit orders are complete, what would he be able to do for you anyway? He's not part of the support staff.
 
A good account/sales rep is to me is one that's proactive not reactive, which doesn't mean calling you all the damn time but checking in once and awhile and being responsive when you call regardless of the amount of business you do with a company.

While not in CA (I'm in WI), in my last two jobs I've used Charter business Fibre for our internet connectivity and it's been rock-solid. Both outages that I can recall were because of a fibre cut but that's 2 over 4+ years. Our account rep has been great, one of the reasons I called him when I came to my new job about 2 years ago. :) My experience with them on the business side had been really good so i recommend them to people when I can.
 
mattjw916 said:
Um, if you told your "account rep" you weren't going to buy anything, why would you need constant communication with him?

After the existing circuit orders are complete, what would he be able to do for you anyway? He's not part of the support staff.
Click to expand...

We still had some outstanding issues to deal with in the take over of this company.
 
StarTrek4U said:
A good account/sales rep is to me is one that's proactive not reactive, which doesn't mean calling you all the damn time but checking in once and awhile and being responsive when you call regardless of the amount of business you do with a company.
Click to expand...

Exactly what I'm getting at!

StarTrek.. You don't have to divulge any pricing, but are they reasonable for their fiber? Currently we have 3/3 that also doubles as the voice service (AT&T IP Flex Service). We were thinking of upgrading the bandwidth out there somewhere in the 6/6 to 10/10 range. In looking at their business services looks like 10/10 would be a good start plus whatever a fractional or full t1 would cost
 
Ah, the infamous "issues" statement. It makes people seem insightful without actually articulating what the problem was... I still don't see why you expect callbacks when you told him you weren't changing your service. Seriously, sales folks have goals to meet that directly impact their take home pay; they generally won't have time to cold-call people that already told them no. Personally I have about a dozen or so accounts at any one time with various vendors. The last thing I want are unsolicited sales calls on an on-going basis. Global Knowledge used to call me all the time and it was horrendously obnoxious, especially when I was busy.

In the gargantuan service provider space where your "rep" probably has thousands of clients I wouldn't expect a lot of proactive-anything from any company. On the other hand if you want lots of hand-holding a smaller provider would probably do that assuming they are competent and can deliver the service levels your business needs.
 
The pricing really depends on how far they have to go to get Fibre to you since that's built in to part of the cost. I do know that we have 20Mb service which is plenty fast for us but our costs our higher since our corporate campus is split between buildings on two sides of a street so in addition to bringing the fibre to our main office they manage the point to point 100Mb fibre connectivity under the road between our two buildings as well. So they had to do some digging in our case but if you're in a relatively urban area you might just be set. To give you an idea- for a 20Mb service and our 100Mb p2p we pay less than $2,000/mo but of course YMMV :)

A nice bonus is that you can also run phone service over the same connection and it's WAY cheaper (like 65% less) that traditional phone service, we're looking at migrating to that in the next year or two.
 
We have point to point wifi between our two buildings, so I don't see a need for multiple locations. I would be a single fiber drop in the main building that would be internet and phone service. We'd be in business. Sounds like I better give them a call after the new year and see what kind of deals they can give us
 
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