Warren Buffett is lucky he doesn’t live in Connecticut.
Charter Communications, one of Berkshire Hathaway’s latest investments, has dispatched a group of emergency technicians to the state after the company was blasted by a heap of customer complaints about spotty Internet service.
“We have a constant problem with intermittent Internet service,” one customer told The Post on Thursday.
The customer said the Charter techie who arrived to fix the situation explained that the company, the No. 4 cable company in the country, was having a major issue with outdated technology in some of its routers.
Charter drafted 30 techies from Michigan to deal with the issue, the techie said, according to the customer.
In a twist, the service complaints against Charter track what the Buffett concern predicted would be commonplace in the event that Comcast merged with Time Warner Cable. The archrival outbid Charter for TWC.
Charter indeed had that many technicians in its “New England region” though it wasn’t because of any widespread Internet service problem but rather to assist with the conversion to all digital and the busy back-to-school season, a spokesperson said.
Charter, led by CEO Tom Rutledge, is looking for regulatory approval to swap millions of customers with TWC as part of the Comcast deal.
Charter will also manage a newly created spin-off company, giving it eventual control of some 8 million additional video subscribers — which will make it the No. 2 cable company in the US.
Each of the three companies is promising consumers a better experience — so the massive recent inflow of complaints to Charter, including some for getting slower Internet speed than promised, can’t help its reputation just when it needs to do so.
FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler issued a warning to all Internet providers that they’d better be providing the speeds that they are charging customers for.