Charter Comm. cable modem service...any good?

[SilverThief]

I live in a small po-dunk town population 5500. Charter Communications has finished upgrading all of the cable lines in town and is now offering digital cable service, along with cable modem service. This is a small town, made up mainly of poor residents who are all stealing their service from DirecTV.
Thats not stretching the truth either...
My question is, even if 3000 of the 5500 people do sign up for cable modem service from Charter (i doubt that 200 people in the whole town even know what a modem is!) will I still get good bandwidth? Or is that dependant upon how much bandwidth Charter brings into the town in the first place?

It will be a couple of months before I can actually get it, but I am looking for any feedback on Charter's reliability and service.

 

[Electrode]

Although charter isn't great, they're the only option here. I live in one of those areas that will never, ever, ever be capable of DSL.

The highest speed they offer is 1.5m/256k. There's not too much slowdown during the day, as only a handfull of people here own a computer, and pretty much all of them are inseperably bound to AOL.

Some of the ups and downs:

Ups:

• The uptime is pretty good
  There's not much slowdown during the day
  Modem lease price is reasonable
  The modems they provide have ethernet ports, no USB-only sh!t here
  No proprietary or windows-only software needed. Just DHCP.

Downs:

• Highest speed available is 1.5m/256k
  Incoming ports needed to run your own POP3 daemon (e-mail server) are blocked. This one really pisses me off!!! :|
  It has been known to die suddenly, and is sometimes out for a long time
  No static IP's, although if you keep the modem hooked up to the same NIC all the time, your IP never seems to change

 

[BillGates]

I have it and my upload is capped at 128K - The Internet Nazis are truly at work here.

They do block common ports such as 21 and 80 - but you can easily run FTP servers off of other ports - mine is on 99.... Unfortunately you can never have a GOOD FTP server because of the upload cap, but it is nice to have around sometimes.

The price keeps going up - but speed never increases...

If you want to download movies and music, you'll like it. If you want super low pings for gaming or want to upload faster, you may want to check out DSL.

 

[SilverThief]

I'm in the same situation as Electrode. We will never have DSL here either.
At this point, I'll take anything over 56k dial-up.