At my house we have Cable TV and Internet services through Charter Communications. In the last several weeks, Charter changed the behavior of their DNS to return a Charter-branded Yahoo! search page if the domain was invalid. This is bad because; one, it breaks the address bar search; two, I want Google; three, another example of poor service from Charter. I occasionally search from the address bar, the automatic Google search is a nice time saver. The text ads on the Charter page are listed inline first with the actual search results below them. This is why Google beats hands down everyone else. Advertisements are separated from search results and they don’t get in the way. Another in the list of Charter annoyances is that POP mail access is so slow. I can download 1.6 MB in about 51 seconds –> 257 kbps! If I max out my connection I can get 384 kbps. 384 is slow any way because Charter’s website says their current Internet tiers are 3, 5, and 10 Megabit. When we signed up for the service the highest tier was 3 Megabit. Here in Hopkinsville, I doubt Charter has upgraded any part of this area to the new tier since they’ve been planning on selling the franchise for a long time.

Speaking of selling the cable franchise, starting this summer we will all be New Wave Comm customers. Supposedly, New Wave is supposed to already be running new fiber and installing equipment to take over service. prophead said, “Their plan to double the internet speed in most service plans is something everyone I work with can appreciate.” Cross your fingers that we will get better service like described but I’ll wait to see when it actually happens.