Well Saturday morning rolled around and sure enough the tech showed up about 8:45am.  Came right in and started testing signal levels.   Everything was fine.  Then went outside and looked at cabling and tested levels at house and at pedestal.  Everything was fine.  I found out he has had a few other customers complain about the same thing.  I guess charter is planning on switching to a new company for telephone service soon and that I guess will resolve the issues I am seeing.  Like I have said the whole time, I will give them 2 weeks and then decide.  If at&t or another company comes at me with a good deal that will make it to easy to decide.  So far I have not seen any other problems with the phone service but then again I am not on the remote end where you get the problems, I am typically at home and that is perfect there normally.

They wanted me to answer a few questions about my install and service for the new phone service I just had installed. He noted that there was a trouble service call placed and wanted to talk about it. Just a few questions and then went on to ask about the nature of my problem. In the end asked from 1-10 what is my rating of their service, I asked install or phone service, he said break it up to the two I mentions. I said install 10, tech was great. Service a 3 because I am probably going to have to go back to at&t if they can’t get my phone service working the same as at&t had it. He then said I can talk to a tech and I said I really do not want to because they had me do two things before and one I was not going to do. I figure they will have me do the two things again and I refuse to pay to have someone come out to fix service that is not working. Not my fault it is not working correctly. I am positive this has nothing to do with my cable to my house or my adapter or my inside wiring. We have two main problems. First when you answer an incoming call at home you hear a short beep or sequel. Not a big deal what what is this and how do you stop it? Second and bigger problem, we at home have not heard any problms at all. It is the remote party (calling or callee, not use at home that hear the problem so we can’t log everytime it happens unless the remote party tells us). It is the good old broken up conversation that typically would happen when you go to download something or upload something on your internet connection and try to talk on the same internet connection. Well this adapter plugs directly into the coax cable and from what i was told has nothing to do with the internet qam channel on our headend at all. So why does it do this? I have no idea. Funny thing happened to me yesterday though. My wife tried to call my cell at the same time I tried to call the home number. I got the voicemail box(not our answering machine). Guess what, my recording on the voicemail system is broken up. So this was happening from the first hour of the install. I setup the voicemail box about 15 minutes after the tech left. I have to check that message again tonight to make sure it is still there. That will be the example I can give the tech when he is out. At least I can show them what is happening.

I let them know they have 2 weeks to make this service what I had with at&t or I would be switching back. I really dislike at&t and would love to stay away from them but charter is making it hard to stick with them so far.

Well the tech came out last Friday.  First thing he did was clean up the cable from the pedestal to the house.  He unhooked the connection at the pedestal and put a little rubber grommet thing on it to water proof it and then closed up the pedestal.  Next he took the grounding block off the house(that was never grounded) and put a new box on the house.  Ran the two wires into it and put a new grounding block in and ran a ground wire to the rest of the common ground wires for gas, electric, phone, etc.  Labeled all wires with tags and what we had then we went inside.  Instantly cut the main line and put new ends on so the main line goes to a two way splitter and then from the splitter it goes to the phone device and the other goes to my 8 way amp.  The phone came right in and the number was ported over in about 15 minutes.  I was amazed they make the tech call in to let them know they are ready.  Then after the tech sees the adapter has it’s config and dialtone he calls back but this time on the new dialtone just installed.  They verify it is working correctly and then hang up.  The phone center ports the number and then calls back, when the call rings the house that means the number was ported correctly.  Done.  The funny thing is, we all hate outsource or overseas call centers, guess where the call center is.  Not in the US.  And the tech gets a different person for every call it sounded like.  Amazing it went so smooth.

Well it seems to be working ok.  They said I had to give the tech $30 at install time.  They would credit my account back that amount.  Guess what.  No credit.  I call in and they say I have no idea why it was never processed(yeah right, pretty sure they just do this to make an extra $30, hoping the customer forgets they should be getting a credit).  Still waiting to see that credit on the web payment system.

Next problem is I have had 3 calls that I know of that the remote party, one time my voicemail for my cell phone, other time a doctor office and last was jenny.  What happens is we at home can hear just fine, but the remote party can barly hear us and we are breaking up.  They typical voip problem of not enough upload bandwidth.  I have seen this many times with standard voip services like vonage, voicepulse, packet8 etc when I am doing to much on my internet connection.  I was told this adapter has it’s own connection back to the headend and will never see this problem.  Funny, it has happened 3 times already.  I will give them 2 weeks if I continue to see this problem I will continue to report the problem and in the end I will ask for credit back and cancel service.  Great service for price if it works.  If this happens then it is terrible service.  Time will tell.

Today is the day.  Hopefully I will be getting a call or the tech will be showing up early afternoon today.  My appointment is between 1pm and 5pm.  A postcard I got two days ago said to keep about 1 1/2 hours set aside after the tech shows up.  That means that if the tech is running late he may be there until 6:30.  I hope the tech is ahead of schedule or at the beginning of his window.  I didn’t get things cleaned up as much as I wanted to around the cable entrance in the basement but hopefully it is clear enough.  I hope the tech is ok with the current setup and does not need to change things around to much.  I will post once it is all done.