Charter Files For "Prearranged Bankruptcy" 82
jamie points out news that Charter Communications filed for "prearranged" Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday, primarily to reorganize some of the $21.7 billion in debt it has accrued. Quoting:
"The St. Louis-based company seeks to emerge from bankruptcy as early as the end of summer and doesn't plan on selling any of its assets to competitors. After Chapter 11, interest costs at Charter, which has never posted a profit since going public in 1999 due to massive debt interest payments, will be cut in half to $830 million a year. The filing restructures about $8 billion of debt at Charter, which is controlled by Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, but leaves about $13 billion of debt on its books. Allen will control 35 percent of the votes in the reorganized company. In the bankruptcy, Allen's 51 percent equity stake in the cable operator will be wiped out, along with shares of other stockholders. Allen also holds some debt and preferred stock."
Re:Could it be their service? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Could it be their service? (Score:2, Informative)
Looking around at all the other dishes in the area (a lot of them are DISH network, I notice, which is owned by AT&T, so probably a lot of DSL customers too)
No, it isn't. DISH Network Corporation is its own publicly traded company, spun off from EchoStar Communications, which is the one that owns the fleet of satellites.
Re:Liquidate the entire damned company! (Score:3, Informative)
Are you one of the customer support reps that LIE to people on the phone when they ask when the installer is coming [archive.org]?
You can resent my stance all you want, you can pretend that the constant heap of shit you pile on your customers is making them happy, but it seems like there is an awfully large amount of incredibly unhappy customers.
it IS their service (Score:3, Informative)
Dear Sir or Madam,
Where I live I currently have two options for broadband: slow DSL (512 kb up/2 Mb down on a good day) or slow Charter cable (768 Mb up/6 Mb down). I currently have DSL installed. Do you know why?
Firstly, let me inform you that the answering service I dealt with during the incident I describe was located in St. Louis, MO, not in the Philippines.
Last summer I was using Charter's cable service. It was flakey at best. One day there was a bad storm that resulted in major flooding in town. My cable service was up the entire time and weathered the storm surprisingly well. However, long after the storm died down and at some point over the next night, my cable service went down for no particular reason!
Throughout the next day, my roommate and I placed several angry calls to try to get them to address the issue without CHARGING us for a service call.
The only thing my roommate was able to determine through his efforts, as I've mentioned above, was that we were speaking with an answering service. That is, we weren't even dealing with a dedicated Charter call center, but an answering service, the kind that also handles calls for local doctors and HVAC companies after hours. It could be possible that we had reached a dedicated department, but he learned that we were not speaking to Charter employees.
During my first call, I had to speak to a supervisor, who informed me that my call to report an outage was not enough for them to take action. She advised me to go knock on my neighbors' doors to find 5 other Charter customers who all had to be inconvenienced by calling in individually before Charter would address the issue.
On my second call, I was able to reach a more competent individual. (As a side note, I work at an answering service, and it can very frequently happen that experienced agents and supervisors are wholly incompetent at doing anything more than saying they can't do anything despite having been given training on customer-specific software. Not that I'm bitter or anything.) She was able to access some actual equipment and verify that 20/50 customers on my node were without service and told me a technician would be able to be dispatched in a few hours.
I was flabbergasted it took that much effort to find someone who could access the actual equipment. When I had a different DSL provider than I do now, the simple act of reaching someone on the phone was enough to get to someone who was able to access the equipment. Sometimes they were able to resolve the problem right over the phone by remotely configuring and troubleshooting the equipment assuming no hardware failure. I can't quite have that with my current DSL service, but their Mumbai-based call center is vastly more helpful than Charter's St. Louis, MO answering service. What's going on here?
Finally, my cable modem synched up later that night, almost 18 hours after it went down. However, their DHCP server was not working, so I forced my cable modem to its last logged IP address and I was back up. Too bad for the people who had to wait for the DHCP and DNS servers to come back up 2 full days later.
That is not acceptable.
Charter's financial problems are directly the result of a free market at work. I could have faster internet, but they pissed me off so badly that I'm satisfied with slower, stabler DSL service to have access to competent support. It's very refreshing to be able to speak with someone in 1st level support who knows what an IP address is. Maybe people in Mumbai are more competent than people in St. Louis.
Thank you.