PSA: Charter Bumps 30 Mbps Customers to 100 Mbps, For Free (Speed Test)

One of my Facebook chums posted the following public service announcement.

If you have Charter home internet and are in the STL area, you should call them and see if you can have them upgrade you to the 100 Mbps download speed for free.

And I thought this was at least worth looking into. I found this:

Effective Tuesday, June 10, 2014, existing eligible Residential Charter Internet customers in the St. Louis, Missouri, metro area will receive an automatic increase to their Internet speed for no additional cost, the notification states. The St. Louis market is the only Charter area to provide New Pricing and Packaging (NPP) customers 100 Mbps of download speed and upload speeds of 4 Mbps.

So I made a phone call. Here's my speed test results beforehand.

The first rep I spoke to was not native to the US and did not seem familiar with the special increase. I asked more directly and was transferred to a more local rep. He indicated that my account should be at 60Mbps (not 30) but that a quick modem reset would get me the 100 Mbps. A few minutes later and...

Wow! Okay, that phone call was definitely worth it. And this is all for no increase or change in my plan or price.

Just Another Charter Speed Test

I could get organized and do these speed tests daily and post my results... but there's one problem. I have a life.

Still, it would be nice to know that I'm getting what I pay for on the regular. Thoughts spring to mind of getting a script or browser plug-in or router tool that does a regular speed test and graphs and charts it. Or perhaps I could write something like that, but my guess is that my nerdy desire for this is not singular and someone has already invented that wheel.

I feel strange. Am I really this nerdy?

Why yes, yes I am.

FIXED! Broadband Speed Test

I forgot to mention, but this did get fixed.

As part of the service call, the rep noted that we'd been getting some channels that were not on our plan level, so we lost those. I guess that's what you get for hiring contractors to do your initial installations, eh Charter?

Cleaning Away My Dastardly Plan

One of many blogs I started with one plan that morphed into another and then another was something I called Dastardly Plan. It was hosted originally on a small 10mb webspace account that I had through Charter back when we lived in Aspen Woods apartments. We cancelled the account with Charter, but the webspace was still available so I started toying with it. The first post is dated from October 2004. I think some of my first posts were random complaints about internal job frustrations, inside jokes and other random references that didn't seem appropriate anywhere else.

I quickly found that I could photos from my Flickr account to this blog and it became a bit of a photo blog. I consider an official "photo" blog to be where someone shares their absolute best and most favorite pictures. And I just manually posted every photo I could from Flickr to my Dastardly Plan. I also experimented with a lot of other linking tools and blog banners. It was a sandbox, a play yard, a goofy space to show off stupid tricks.

And today I'm retiring it. Historically, I'd gotten behind posting photos from Flickr and then the number of archived photos I could access got too far behind for their standard account limit so I just stopped in 2011. More recently, Flickr has greatly increased their features for standard users, meaning I can get to those old pictures more easily. But I've also been using IFTTT for the past couple of months to automatically post my photos to my WordPress blog.

SO it is time to clean house a bit. From this moment, I'm going to start cleaning up these old posts and importing any of the still active photo posts into my other site at James A. Arconati.net.

Say goodbye and good riddance to ArcoJedi's Dastardly Plan as well as all it's former URLs.

• http://dastardlyplan.blogspot.com/
• http://webpages.charter.net/arcojedi/

Speedtest.net - Charter ISP

We haven't been getting the best Internet speeds the past few days, most likely due to the storms and power outages in the area.

We never lost power, but our television, phone and Internet were out for a while. Since it came back it's been a bit wonky but it seems to be a little bit better now. Here is a previous speed test.

Speedtest.net - Charter ISP

It's time once again to test my Internet speed.

We've been having some connection and speed issues over the last two days, but one simple call to technical support and a modem reprovision later and things are moving along just fine. I like to make mention of this and log the results in a public place for whoever it is that might care. I don't have a 'before' speed result on this as Speedtest.net wouldn't even load earlier tonight.