Charter Upgrades Internet Customers To 100 Mbps – Some May Have to Contact Support
Charter Rolls out 100 Mbps To Virtually Every Market They Serve
A blog came out from Charter on November 30, 2017 announcing that the company would be upgrading virtually all of their markets to 100Mbps connections. After reading the blog, which outlines the progress Charter made in bringing faster internet to various markets, I began to wonder when my particular market would see the promised speed upgrade and whether it would be a silent push, or if I’d have to put things into motion myself. Charter is the only viable, affordable high speed ISP available in my area. Unless I want to go with outdated, slow DSL or very expensive wireless technology that hooks into a fiber backbone for hundreds of dollars a month, Charter is what I am left with. If you are like me, Charter or another ISP may have a contract in place with your local county to be the only internet service provider, leaving you at the mercy of the ISP. With that said, I’ve been happy with Charter during my four years as a customer with them and they’ve given me excellent service every time I’ve called. If I have one complaint, their marketing team is super aggressive and sends me way too many junk fliers. I live in Santa Cruz county, which is a fairly populous area nestled between some mountains, just south of the bustling Silicon Valley. We’re not in the Silicon Valley, but there is a large population of Silicon Valley techies who live in Santa Cruz, so slow, unstable internet definitely is a no-go around here.
Since we are several days into 2018, I decided to reset my Arris modem today and do a SpeedTest to see if Charter had rolled the 100 Mbps upgrade out silently in the past few weeks. I was still at the 60 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload speeds I have been at since signing up with Charter over four years ago, so I decided to contact support via their website live chat, which I’ve found to be the quickest, easiest way to contact the ISP. I was connected with Charter support member “Tim,” who informed me that there was indeed a speed upgrade available, to 100/5, but that customers would need to contact Charter to get this upgrade, as Charter cannot make any unauthorized changes to accounts. I was a little baffled, because I know that there have been instances of other customers who get pushed the config file update without any prompting, but Tim informed me that this was only for test markets. Regardless, Tim asked if upgrading to 100/5 would be okay and I confirmed. He then said that the upgrade was noted and would take up to 24 hours to complete. A few moments later, my modem did a reboot and after being momentarily offline, I was reconnected. Now, it was time to run SpeedTest again to see if my support chat had netted me the speed upgrade that Tim had confirmed.
Once my Arris modem reset and my router was back online, SpeedTest confirmed that my connection was now running at over 100 Mbps, with a 5 Mbps upload. I really wish a faster upload speed was part of the upgrade so that I could have overhead do more reliable streaming outside of my network via Plex, but that may come down the road. For now, I am happy to report that my area has 100 Mbps speeds available for no extra charge and that the only thing you need to do is contact Charter via chat or phone to get your upgrade pushed.
The whole bandwidth upgrade process took me about twenty minutes, from the original SpeedTest coming in at 60 Mbps to completing the second SpeedTest at over 100 Mbps once the upgrade had completed. My total actual contact time with Charter was probably around ten minutes, which is fine.
More than 99 percent of our customers now have access to Spectrum Internet with starting speeds of 100 Mbps. Were delivering internet customers even more speed for streaming, surfing and social media, all with no change in the price of their Spectrum package.
According to press releases it looks like the nationwide upgrade to 100 Mbps for Spectrum customers was completed on December 20th, 2017. Speed upgrades in most markets should be automatic but some customers, like myself, will have to contact Charter support to push the upgrade. If you are a Charter customer, do yourself a favor and run a SpeedTest to verify your current download speed. If it isn’t currently nearing 100 Mbps, head over to Charter support and see if they have an upgrade to push to you, as virtually every market Charter serves should now have access to 100 Mbps download speeds.