Hello. I am a former Spectrum customer as we ditched Spectrum a while back and switched to Fastwyre Fiber. So far, I have been loving Fastwyre, they have been a joy to work with. A breath of fresh air. But, before that, we were, sadly, a Spectrum customer. And my experience with Spectrum was nothing short of awful. I at some points had constant breakdowns due to Spectrum's horrible and downright dogwater internet service. They were always a pain to deal with and was always the most frustrating ISP we have ever dealt with. They really were a nightmare to deal with on certain days. They seriously pissed me off.
As a Charter Communications customer for over 10 years (including Spectrum years), we expected to be treated fairly and had decent if not good speeds. Nope! As soon as they completed the merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House, it all went to crap. Speeds of our router slowed down gradually over time with no signs of ever stopping. At some point, we were getting less than a quarter of their actual speeds. It was the absolute worst during the pandemic when everyone was needing access to COVID-19 information like info as well as locations to where they could take their vaccines. It slowed down 10x as much.
One time, I was trying to watch a Twitch stream on my laptop at the time that since got scrapped. Oh my god, the buffering was atrocious. The stream kept buffering every few minutes or so and it literally made the entire stream unwatchable. It actually, honestly, pissed me off and it made me just leave the stream entirely. I wish I was able to just cancel Spectrum right then and there. That day will never be forgotten in my eyes. Spectrum was just yanking our chains at this point, treating us like complete arse. That day seriously made my blood boil because all I wanted to do is relax and watch a Twitch stream. Absolutely atrocious behavior from Spectrum.
In fact, I couldn't even simply browse the internet on certain days without Spectrum deliberately freezing or straight up throttling my traffic. Websites would load like a snail, and sometimes would refuse to load at all. Sometimes, it got so slow that I couldn't access about 99% of websites without being shown the infamous Chrome dino. The fact that I kept seeing that dino on my screen so constantly just proves how inconsistent and unstable their internet is. The internet, at a point, literally got so slow that it iddn't even exceed a single megabyte in speeds. Yep, you heard me. Less than a megabyte both down and up at one point (it hit 0.16 mbps down and 0.02 mpbs up). It is the all-time record for slow Spectrum speeds for me personally. I truly couldn't enjoy my time on the internet with Spectrum due to their inconsistent and crappy speeds. It would get so bad to the point where I would have to use my mobile hotspot pretty much 100% of the time.
And oh boy, their Customer Service to us in particular was incredibly unhelpful and quite frankly assholes at times. All we were doing was just explain that our speeds were constantly going down the crapper and all the time the only response that we got was to restart the router/modem and try again. Sometimes, the reps were just assholes and hung up on us. Your customer is trying to get help, and you just hang up the phone on them purely out of spite? Shame on you! Imagine if I was working for an ISP and I just hung the phone up on you without even helping you! You'd be rightfully pissed off! Well, don't do that crap to us! Well, once they did finally get technicians out there, they only made things worse. First one installed a new router that made our internet go out twice as frequently within the first 5 minutes of it being installed, and the other one changed everything on the box outside of our house, and still made it worse. How do you send two tech guys out and have them manage to make our internet worse?
In fact, there was one time that our internet was out for a whole 3 hours with no word or ETA from Spectrum. It just went down and we did not get a single word or message from them. Everything went down, the phone, the internet, and the cable. We could not access anything, we could not make calls, we could not go online, and we couldn't even watch TV. Every bit of our Spectrum service was down. We just had to sit there and wait for the braindead employees to get it working again. It would have been nice if we were given a word on if there was an outage or if there was scheduled maintenance for our area. Nope! We couldn't even call them to find out what was going on. We just had to sit there for 3 hours waiting for our service to be restored. It took over 3 hours for them to fix our service, the longest outage we have ever faced. And I know others might not be so lucky. Some of you have outages going on for more than a day. A week. Possibly even a month. Some of you may be really unlucky with a year-long outage, but I don't know.
And despite all of that, Spectrum's prices were always outrageously expensive. At one point, the subscription we had to Spectrum Cable literally caused our price to go over $300 on the day our payment was due. Literally. We had to pay that much, and that was the time when we still had the cable portion of our service before we cut cord due to it making our bill insanely expensive. And even when we got rid of Spectrum Cable, our bill for the internet and phone combined still exceeded over $100 per month. We were still expected to pay this much for internet that never worked. And it was like this every month. In fact, it continued to rise every month that we continued to be on Spectrum. We barely had enough left by the end of it. Thanks to my autism check, it was just always barely enough to pay for most of the things we have in our house, like internet and water. So, thankfully, my check managed to keep us from going homeless due to Spectrum's insane prices for poor service. If it weren't for that check keeping us afloat, we'd have been on the streets by now, so I am thankful that check kept us from being evicted..
And speaking of Spectrum Cable, there was barely anything good on our subscription. Every time, there was always good channels getting replaced with channels we have never heard of. I was extremely upset when the good retro channel INSP was replaced with GRIT. INSP was a TV channel where we would watch a lot of classic shows that my uncle who passed away a while back grew up with. He was furious when GRIT replaced INSP, and I can't blame him. GRIT was just a TV channel with nothing but random Western shows that we truly didn't even care about. Spectrum replaced a channel we loved with a channel we couldn't care less about. Thank God that they never touched MeTV while we were still on cable, or there would've been a riot. Also, Spectrum had two contract disputes. One with Viacom, and one with Tribune Broadcasting. The Viacom one was set to bring all Nick channels offline, and thankfully, that never happened. But, the Tribune one happened, and it took our local news channel owned by Fox offline. So, now, there was no way for us to get weather on TV, and it pissed off Chiefs fans who were looking forward to seeing them in the Playoffs (this happened in 2019). And the only Spectrum Original I even cared for was Curfew because it had an interesting show concept.
And oh man, when we had cable, the commercial breaks were awful. Let me sum it up for you. Spectrum ad. Spectrum ad. Medicare ad. Medicare ad. Spectrum ad. Medicare ad. All day, non-stop. I truly was getting fed up with all of the Spectrum ads and Medicare ads! For one, we already have Spectrum, why are you showing us ads for a product we already have, and, quite frankly, don't like? And two, why are you showing us these stupid Medicare commercials 24/7? Oh my God, the ones starring Joe Namath and Jimmie Walker were the most rampant when we had cable. I hated that Joe Namath went from being a former NFL quarterback to a person lying about Medicare benefits, and I hate Jimmie Walker's stupid voice. Him saying "It's FREE!" in that stupid high pitch drove me to madness. The commercial breaks were truly the worst. The Kay Jeweller's ad with that stupid "You Are The Reason" song made me wish I was deaf on numerous occasions. Spectrum's ad breaks on cable were abysmal and I am so glad we cut the cord on them so we didn't have to listen to any more of Spectrum's stupid showboating, the cringe ads, or the blatant and downright scam ads.
And oh man, don't even get me started on that "Directory Assistance" nonsense. It was this stupid phone number that we used frequently if we needed to find a business. Whenever we called, their automated bot responds and asks for the name of a city and/or business. Every single time, the bot either gave us the wrong business or said the name of cities or businesses incorrectly. Their stupid bot made me wanna pull my hair out on numerous occasions. It always took so long before the bot gave up and connected us to an operator who actually would usually send us to the correct place. Sometimes, they also gave incorrect businesses or were complete assholes who just hung the phone up on us, but that was rare, the operators were usually really nice even though we could barely hear a word that they were saying. And every time we were in fact hung up on or given an incorrect business through an operator, we'd have to go through the stupid bot again, and every time we had to, it only made me wanna pull out my hair even more. We had to go through this stupid bot 3 times at one point before an operator gave us the correct business. That day was especially a nightmare.
But, the good news is that I am no longer a Spectrum customer. On the very first day of May this year, we were finally able to disconnect our Spectrum internet and welcome Fastwyre Broadband's fiber internet into our home. And let me tell you, switching was the best decision we have ever made. Our bill has never been increased as far as I am aware, and the internet has constantly and consistently been up every single day with no outages, that is, until the middle of the night when most of us are all sleeping. But, it usually takes them less than 10 minutes to get it back up, and then it's working again. And our speeds? Absolutely incredible. We have always hit over 800 megabits per second both download and upload. Every single time. Almost a gigabyte in speeds every time. We have only had our Fastwyre fiber for a little over 4 months at this point and they have truly been a breath of fresh air. A thousand times better than what Spectrum could ever muster. And as soon as we dumped Spectrum for Fastwyre, they have constantly sent us junk mail in a desperate attempt to get us back by offering huge price discounts and promotions for being a long-time customer. And every time, we just laugh and throw their envelopes into the bin. It's laughable they ever think that will get us back.
In short: Spectrum is an awful ISP, and if you can switch to a better ISP, definitely do so.