Charter and Bandwith Caps: No Info

It's a simple thing. Charter says I can't use more than 250Gb of bandwidth each month. I spent an hour on the phone last month to learn that their bandwidth cap cycle is tied to the calendar month, not my billing cycle. Today, now that it's near the end of the month, I wanted to know how much bandwidth I've used. Summary: they won't tell me.

First level support was completely confused and unable to help.

Second level support put me on hold and came back with (note, all quotes are paraphrasing) "well, we don't track that info." "Ok, so I can use whatever bandwidth I want, right?" I responded. "Well, no...."

Of course they're tracking my bandwidth usage.

So I told them that I don't find it reasonable for them to put limits on me without giving me the tools to track my usage. They told me again and again that a normal user shouldn't be concerned about the bandwidth cap. Not relevant. If they've given themselves the right to limit my bandwidth and cut off my access then they should give me a way to get a status.

On hold a second time. Now they come back with "it's our policy to not tell you until you're close to the limit."

I explain again how I'll be contacting state and federal government and that I find this an unfair business practice. Then I'm told that I should monitor it myself. Which is unfeasible. Even in-router packages have problems with power outages where hours worth of bandwidth are lost. I don't want to know what I think my usage is... I need to know what they think my usage is.

Back and forth, back and forth.

Bottom line is that they won't provide me the information and won't even give me somebody else to talk to about it. I spent a bunch of time trying to understand whether or not they could provide it... I think they can and believe that the person I was talking to saw the number on the screen... before he realized what was really going on he dug into screens a few times... I suspect they have something like "contact supervisor before giving to customer" next to the number. Complete speculation, of course.

Not sure if anybody else has experienced this but it's a big issue. At the national level legislators are looking at the bandwidth cap practice trying to understand its effects on consumers. I'm not making a statement on caps themselves in this post. I'm making a statement on how companies implement them. I should have a way to track my usage... phone, website, etc.

They're not making such information available at this time. And that makes their implementation of bandwidth caps unacceptable and, in my eyes, unethical.

Update: A charter rep, Eric Ketzer , has responded via Twitter... I appreciate the response and am glad to hear that they're working to make this information available to users.