James Chamberlin

I’ve had quite a time lately with my cable company, Charter Communications. I’ve been battling signal problems for a few months. In February, I finally broke down and called them. They sent out a technician on February 26th to replace the line that comes from the telephone pole to the house. When he left, the signal was 100%. I was happy as a clam.

A few days went by and I was right back to square one. All of my channels were pixelated and some of the HD channels didn’t come in at all. The number of channels affected with the total blackout seemed to be just a select few channels that were right next to one another. TBS HD and USA HD are close together and they were both out.

A tech came out on March 6th. He took readings inside the house, outside the house, and at the pole. He determined one channel was likely bad but all he could do was write a trouble report and scheduled either a line or system technician to come out the next day.

If the guy did come the next day, I wouldn’t know. No one came to the house, but Charter’s system said someone did respond and did something to the line in the neighborhood. It worked for a couple days.

On March 14th, I went through the same process. The guy said there appeared to be a problem with the low frequencies, filled out another report and had another guy come out the next day or the following day.

I’m not sure if that’s what happened because it wasn’t until March 18th that someone came out to the house. Oddly, the signal was working again prior to his showing up, but was flaky AFTER he showed up. What the heck did that tech do?

I’m not sure, so later on the 18th, I called Charter and complained about the signal. Someone couldn’t come out until the 19th. Damn!

Of course by the time the guy showed up on the 19th, the signal was working again. The guy that came out seemed to be one of the older, perhaps higher ranking guys. He really knew what he was doing. He not only checked the line for signal strength but for signal quality and my signal passed with flying colors.

I’m hoping this is all in the past now. I’m tired of not being able to watch TV. March Madness is upon us and I expect to watch a lot of basketball over the next few weeks.

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