This note arrived in Monday, December 14th's email.  A similar message arrived last week.  Our Township Manager has converted the Township phone service from AT&T copper wire based land lines to Charter's Voice over Internet (VOIP).  He mentions this in his December 8 Manager's Report. Sounds very proactive and twenty-first century, doesn't it?

The problem is that Charter is not 100% reliable.  Anyone who has Charter internet has learned this. 

Charter subscribers learn to live with interruptions because we have no choice.  When it's running, which is most of the time, the Charter downlink clocks along at about 100 megabits per second.  When it's not running, it goes to zero.  Because Charter is intermittent, I lease a Verizon WIFI hotspot as a backup internet connection.

This is the long way around to telling my favorite Charter Cable horror story.  At least once a week Charter salespeople used to call me at home on my old fashioned but incredibly reliable AT&T land line.  They tried to convince me that I could save big money by converting my land line phone to Charter's internet phone service.  Although the irony seemed lost on the salespeople, several times their calls arrived in the middle of a Charter internet outage.

We received the above note because we're on the Township's mailing list.  They distribute the mailing list using MailChimp, an outside service.  MailChimp is the big brother of TinyLetter, the free service which Northfield Neighbors uses to email our mailing list.  TinyLetter is free for up to 5,000 subscribers.