I've been experiencing 5%-20% packet loss over the past several days on my home Charter High-Speed cable connection.

It's affected my home Vonage VoIP phone line.

I called yesterday from Vonage to Charter, but the packet loss was so bad, that the technician couldn't hear me and at times I couldn't hear him. I would have called from my cellphone, but unfortunately I don't get service in my house.

Then today my wife called me at work to say that the Internet was completely down as was the Vonage phone service. Of course, I knew Charter was to blame, so I then called my local Charter tech support number at this number 800-827-8288.

Their IVR was having difficulty detecting my DTMF digits even though I was not making a VoIP call. (VoIP often affects DTMF touch tone digits).

It didn't detect my touch tone digit, so I was then transferred to an operator who said "Charter Communications. Can I help you?".
I said "Yes, I'm having problems with my Internet connection."
"Charter Communications. Can I help you?"
I repeated, "Yes, I'm having problems with my Internet connection."
"Charter Communications. Can I help you?"
"hello??? hello? Can you hear me?"
"For quality assurance purposes I am stating that their is no customer response."

I was then hung up on. ARGH!!!!

I tried two more times - same thing. I could hear them, but they could not hear me.

Could be a major Charter outage. The fact that I could hear them but they could not hear me points to the possibility that Charter is using VoIP in their tech support department. Perhaps their upstream bandwidth is OK, but their downstream is flooded, which is why they couldn't hear me. Or it could have been Vonage that was to blame.

Anyone else willing to try calling the above number and see if they can get through to tech support? Post a comment if you find out anything.