I'm sorry if I'm bitter toward Charter, but I feel as though Charter has screwed their customers many times since they started in this market. I don't want to get started on this soapbox, however, because I have had several experiences myself with Charter (including incorrect billing and improper modem provisioning), and can talk for pages. On the flip side, I guess that's the price to pay for dealing with a large, loosely fragmented company. And, after all, my hometown of Waynesville would have never had access to as large of a lineup as they do if Charter had not integrated the formerly Cablevision of Asheville and Sammons Communications in Waynesville.
In any case, I believe that the slowdown that I am detecting is actually comprised of two factors. First of all -- signal strength. I live in an apartment, and even though I have the "wiring plan," I have been advised by Charter that they cannot tamper with any of the wiring to provide a stronger signal like they would in a privately owned (or rented) house. This was even causing problems with my HDTV reception, but a bidirectional amplifier seems to have rectified that problem -- for the most part. Secondly -- I am not certain how far I am to BellSouth's CO (I know that DSL speed depends on distance), however I suspect that I am not getting much DSL signal degradation, which causes me to notice some of the Charter cable sluggishness.
In anycase, as evidenced by the large number of informative websites discussing the differences between DSL and Cable broadband, I guess we could continue the Internet speed discussion indefinitely.
By the way, I have also been to the Simpsonville call center (I live on the other side of 385 from there), and the people there were very helpful -- both black and white. Though I do not know your personal experience, and am not trying to sway you to believe otherwise, I am not sure where the moderators of this board stand on comments such as this -- so you might want to tone down public racial assumptions.