© 2024 Charter Communications Reviews 

Spectrum is the worst and deserve 0 stars.

I am an independent contractor working from home, using Spectrum internet. I pay for the fastest service, they advertise great, reliable internet, which is a lie, idk how many times I was unable to work due to poor service, lagging internet or no internet at all. Repairs and fixing slow speeds are made slow and usually will only help for a few days. My bill goes steady up, I was offered a business account, which would ensure that spectrum will fix issues immediately, they advertise 49.99 business plans, yet I could not switch over, I was quoted 150$ a month. This company is money hungry, does not care about their customers, never get a sincere apology.

My bill went up quite a bit in one month. Since the cost was now over my budget, I decided my only option was to cancel my service. The lady I spoke to was more interested in selling cell phone service than listening to me and my needs. I had to repeatedly tell her I was happy with my cell phone carrier and never had a single problem with them. After 45 minutes of this, we finally got to the point of my call and set a cancelation date in the future, but as soon as I hung up the phone, everything went dead.

I called back and got a gentleman in the Sales department who listened to me. He apologized and told me Spectrum wanted to retain me as a customer. He restarted my internet and TV but told me I would have to cancel again so he sent me to "Retention." He said the Retention department would do whatever they could to keep me as a customer. The lady who answered the phone in the Retention department sounded very bored and was not at all interested in keeping my business. I told her my situation and she asked me to hold on. When she came back, she said okay your service is canceled effective the date I had requested earlier. That was the extent of our conversation. She made no attempt to keep me as a customer and the worst of it, when we hung up everything went out again.

I was so upset at this point, I was in tears. I had spent about an hour and a half on this and The Retention Department kept disconnecting my service instead of trying to retain it.

I waited about an hour to call back so I wouldn't cry while talking to them. I was connected to a salesman who apologized several times and reconnected my service again. He advised that I wait until the day I wanted to cancel, to call back. Just think, if the Retention Department cared as much about the customers as the Sales Department, I would have left singing Spectrum's praises. Instead, I'm writing a negative review.

Wake up Spectrum. I left DirecTV after 20 years for this same reason. Now after 5 years, I'm leaving you. Treat your loyal customers right and for goodness sakes train your Retention Department on how to retain customers.

I get it. Prices go up. We should all be aware and take advantage of “specials” and “bundling.” But at a certain point it’s just.not.worth.it any longer! We’re mostly part-timers, so opted for basic TV service, bundled with the fastest wifi/internet service. We pretty much ignore our terrible picture quality, along with never-ending - and more frequent - buffering as our TV tries to attain signal because we don’t watch that much TV. Making frequent calls to Spectrum to see what their “discount of the month” might happen to be just wasn’t worth it due to long phone wait times and obvious attempts to “up-sell” us on more channels, additional bundled services. 


A year ago we were fed up enough that we called to see what could be done, and were told we needed to return our cable box to the company. The CSR said if a cable box isn’t used at least once a month that it turns into a “brick” and can’t be revived remotely. We stood in line an HOUR to turn in the box at our local storefront in Bradenton - and *that* was pre-COVID! We decided our continued reception deprecation was the price we had to pay - UNTIL WE GOT A ROKU!! (But this isn’t about Roku - it’s *all* about Spectrum!)

Thanks to support from both our son and from advice read both online and from the “Cut the Cord” Nextdoor group, I called today to terminate all TV portions of our Spectrum service. (We’ve honestly not had problems with the wifi/internet as we’re often not here so have not been impacted by outages we’ve heard about.)

I was on hold for a short 10 minutes to get to the first Spectrum CSR - who sent me along to the CSR who would do the actual termination of my TV services. After 30 minutes, an initially pleasant woman came on the phone - until she understood I wasn’t going to be up-sold or scolded into not having called regularly to take advantage of new plans or additional bundling that they would have offered me. 


The kicker, though was that if you don’t call them just before your monthly billing timeframe ends - they DO NOT PRO-RATE! I am going to have to pay for the ENTIRE billing month before my new rate takes effect, even though we’re into the billing period by some 5 days! I said in that case to just keep me on the TV service until the end of the timeframe - NO CAN DO! I’d have to call back and spend ANOTHER HOUR on the phone repeating all I’d just said and done to terminate the TV portion!


(Incidentally - I had just completed a survey from our VA Comcast/Xfinity company - to whom I gave a GLOWING review as
1) they don’t raise their prices 3 times in a year - as Spectrum has done;
2) whose reception is stellar, and
3) whose customer service is spot on and who don’t try to up-sell me on what they have to offer on the rare occasion I do have to call them for a remote re-set!)


I guess when you’re the BEST, you don’t need to advertise or be misleading! If not - you make your payroll by fleecing your customers.

Where to start, Spectrum is horrible, but you could be way better than Comcast.

For one, Spectrum is like Comcast, they will try and overthrow smaller companies offering better Internet and kill off competition. Two, Spectrum tracks what you do, literally. For example (I didn't do this), but if you have a roommate that torrents tv shows or movies off of an application, they will send you a copyright claim to your email (do it again and they'll terminate you from their service). Finally three, you can't upgrade your Internet and no Fiber support (everything is done via coax, just like Comcast). I live in a city filled with College students, you'd think that we could upgrade our Internet to maybe 400 upload and 400 download, nope. You get stuck with 100 download and 11 upload. With students having laptops, consoles, PC's, phones and so much more, 100 download is nothing.

Now you ask, how much do they charge for this "100 download and 11 upload." We pay $50 for Internet only, that includes the $5 cost of the Router (which isn't free). So normally, you can have Internet, but you have to pay extra for Wi-Fi.... Amazing.

Due note, if you do plan on cancelling your service. A technician won't come to pick up the equipment. You will have to bring it to a USPS store to ship it or a local Spectrum store to drop it off.

I do have to say, Spectrum isn't that much like Comcast since Spectrum has no data-caps. This is the core reason why it has 3 stars and not 2. Spectrum, please if you give the customers what they want, those 1GB speeds or even allowing people to go past the 100 download (to even the 500 download at least) we will be forever grateful.

Spectrum still lives in the early 2000's.