<P>It's funny how most of the gripes I hear about broadband service come from areas where the high-speed Internet service choices are very limited. Or maybe it's not so funny. It's certainly no laughing matter for one reader who got tricked by Charter Communications into paying more for less service.</P> <P>"There's more than one ISP engaged in shady practices," the reader wrote recently. "In fact, based on r It’s funny how most of the gripes I hear about broadband service come from areas where the high-speed Internet service choices are very limited. Or maybe it’s not so funny. It’s certainly no laughing matter for one reader who got tricked by Charter Communications into paying more for less service.“There’s more than one ISP engaged in shady practices,” the reader wrote recently. “In fact, based on recent experiences with several ISPs, I’d have to say that shady practices are the norm, along with extremely poor customer support and ill-informed sales people. The area where I live is one of those pockets where broadband is very limited, and I lived with ISDN long after many of my friends had DSL. Currently in the neighborhood I’m living in, Charter Cable has been the only high-speed provider for the last few years. I work from home and had signed up for both cable TV and broadband through them.”While it was nice he was finally able to ditch ISDN, the one thing the reader really missed was having a static IP address. “Since I have a need to run my own mail server, I was getting many mails bounced by other mail servers still depending on outdated blacklists that lump any server with a dynamic IP address into the spam bucket. I’ve tried twice to get static IP addresses, once through Clearwire, a wireless broadband company that took my signup fees after I explained why I wanted static IP address, and only informed me three weeks later that the reason my mail server wasn’t able to send mail was that they filtered all outbound SMTP traffic! It took another month and a half to get my money back.” The reader would have been willing to pay more for a static IP address, but Charter then told him about a deal where he could pay less. “Recently, I signed up for Charter’s ‘business-class’ service, which seemed to be the only way to get a static IP address,” the reader wrote. “When I signed up, the business rep told me that it was currently a great deal because I could get the same service I was getting through my residential account, both cable TV and broadband, for $99/month instead of the $122/month the residential account was costing. I signed the contract he faxed me and waited eagerly for the new service. If only I’d noticed the three-year commitment buried in the fine print…”“The address was indeed static, but after two months, they have yet to change the PTR record to reflect my domain so that reverse DNS lookups function correctly, which means I’m still getting blocked by a lot of sites even with a static IP address, since the domain lookup shows Charter rather than my domain. They also double-billed me on both my old residential account and my new ‘business-class’ account. When I complained about this, they closed the residential account, which shut down the DVR I’d been renting from them and lost about a third of the channels I’d been paying for. It turns out that ‘business-class’ accounts can only get basic and expanded basic cable, and that for ‘copyright reasons’ DVRs are not supported on business accounts.”When the reader complained about losing part of the cable TV functionality while still not getting the benefit of his static IP address, Charter’s suggestion was that he pay more money for both residential and business accounts. ” Since they’re not providing me with the service I expected at the price they claimed, I’ve asked them to void the contract so I can pursue other options, and have since received nothing but stalls like ‘I have to run this past my supervisor’ with no return calls. They’re currently saying I have a three-year commitment to the business service, which means I’d have to pay $99/month for internet access (plus stupid low-end cable TV that I won’t use), plus $59 for residential cable TV with DVR, no discounts, no package deals, no nothing. They say if I cancel, I still owe $3600 anyway. I’m so ticked off I have an appointment to talk with a lawyer about the whole thing. I’m trying to find out if the owner of the house will allow me to install a dish. If so, then I’ll sue to get out of bad contract, get DISH with DVR, DSL, and never, ever have anything to do with Charter again.” It’s a pattern the reader has seen not only with other ISPs. “It seems that more and more businesses are perfectly willing to resort to deceptive or outright misrepresentation to get your business, and then lie or cheat if you ask for what you were promised,” the reader wrote. “Credit card companies that show late payments three days before the due date of the payment, ISPs that make you fight to get what you’re paying for, cell companies that change rate plans every three months – you’d think that loosing customers would be more of a concern, but apparently they rely on consumers having no memory for these kinds of incidents.”If your broadband vendor’s playing a joke on you, get the last laugh by posting your gripe on my website, calling the Gripe Line voice mail at 1 888 875-7916 or writing me at Foster@gripe2ed.com.Read and post comments about this story here. 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