Initial Review of Charter's ISP Service

This is not my usual kind of content, but I believe reputation is important, so I'm posting this review here for posterity. I don't expect a whole lot of upvotes from this, and I think Steem could benefit from tools that make reviews like this more readily accessible and to tally up review scores, etc.

It has occurred to me that many people may have come to expect a different class of content from this account. Let me know in the comments if this kind of content is interesting to you, or if you'd rather I use a different account for this kind of content and reserve this one for my usual content (philosophy, technical explanations, development, etc).

Just got my internet set up in my new pad in St. Louis. I scheduled the appointment on Monday for between 10 and 11am. The technician arrived at about 10:35 (after I got a robocall saying he was expected at 10:30). He was easy to work with and understand, and he worked efficiently.

My laptop doesn't have an ethernet port (it came with a USB NIC, but I have no idea where that is), so I had to do this instead so I could configure my router. :D

I have to say, I can't complain about the service so far, though. The local cable cartel is Charter, and for $40/mo I get a 100Mbps line, but so far I can pull a sustained 130 (I can't push even 5, but I'm not sure what upstream speed I'm paying for), which has never happened to me before. The installation was quick and easy (guy came out, crimped some coax, wired in the modem, did something outside, and that was it. Maybe 30 mins), though they charged me $50 for it.

Edit: The installation was actually $35. Derp

And for the geeks like me:

--- google.com ping statistics ---
50 packets transmitted, 50 received, 0% packet loss, time 9828ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 16.899/22.863/48.779/5.184 ms

So far (first impression, less than one day of use), I rate it 9/10 (revised, see edit below). If the upstream were better and they hadn't charged me (or at least charged less) for the installation, it would be a cool 10.

Edit: I should also mention that there was no long-term contract involved; it's month-to-month. There was no option to use my own modem for a discount, though that's not super important to me. There was an option to rent a wifi router with a support service for several bucks extra a month, but I didn't take it. I used my own router, which worked with the modem automatically as expected.

There is no IPv6 support, though they talk about an official 6RD option on their site. I haven't tried it as yet. I bump them to 8/10 for the lack of real IPv6. IPv4 was never intended as more than an early 80's lab experiment, and it's now run out of addresses. It's seriously poor form for ISPs to not have IPv6 support yet.