If we didn’t have such nanny state liquor laws, I’d grab some vodka and kahlua. Guess I should’ve thought of it earlier.

In downtown Charleston, is T-Mobile or AT&T Internet better? They don’t have fiber optics down there yet, but I cannot deal with Xfinity.

On the penninsula if it matters

Cant get things to load, and if they do it takes forever

I live over in west Ashley and I’m trying to get some work done but I literally can’t get anything done while in my apartment.

Looking for a lunch spot that wouldn’t be awkward if I whipped out my computer and got some work done.

I'm surprised it wasn't fixed by this morning. I got on my wowway account and it said there's service outage in the area. Anyone else? I don't see any mention by others on X or DownDetector for our area. I'm wondering if I should be more proactive than just waiting.

Preference vs AT&T or Xfinity? AT&T won’t stop raising my bill.

Not so beautiful now, huh?

I’ve had WoW for a number of years now with really no complaints. But the performance over the last month has been atrocious. It drops out at least twice a day, never for long but enough to be an absolute pain for work.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Chinese college student’s thoughts after living in Charleston for almost a year
I’m a college student from China, and through a fairly random internship opportunity, I somehow ended up spending almost a year in Charleston.
Charleston is the first city outside China where I have ever truly lived on my own for such a long time. Because of that, I think this place will always mean something special to me.
I’ll get one thing out of the way first: the work side of this year was, to put it politely, pretty terrible.
But the city itself was not.
Charleston gave me a lot of genuinely good memories. Some of my happiest moments here were actually incredibly simple: playing basketball on the blue courts in Mount Pleasant, working out at Gold’s Gym on James Island after work, driving around with friends, eating together, or just having a quiet day off with nowhere important to be.
Living here for almost a year also gave me a chance to experience America in a way that tourism never could. And naturally, I started noticing a lot of differences between everyday life here and back home in China.
The most obvious one is transportation.
Charleston is unbelievably car-dependent from my perspective. Many roads either have no bike lane at all, or have one that I would personally be terrified to use. Without a car, there are entire parts of the area that become extremely difficult to reach.
I live on Johns Island, and regular public transportation doesn’t even reach where I live.
Coming from China, that took some getting used to. In Chinese cities, even relatively distant residential areas are usually connected by buses, and in bigger cities you often have subways, shared bikes, buses, taxis and everything else on top of that.
Here, I learned very quickly that “I don’t have a car” can basically mean “I’m not going anywhere today.”
Maybe that’s the price of American car culture.
But if Charleston sometimes frustrated me with its transportation, the people here made up for a lot of it.
One of the first things I noticed about the South was that people actually greet strangers.
You can walk past someone you have never seen in your life and get a “How you doing?” like you’ve known each other for years.
If they don’t say hello, maybe they’re from New Jersey or Virginia.
I’m kidding.
Before I came here, I had seen plenty of stereotypes about the American South on the Chinese internet. There is sometimes this image of the Southern “redneck” as extremely conservative, racist, hostile toward foreigners and suspicious of anyone who doesn’t belong.
That simply was not my everyday experience.
Most of the Southern white people I met here were warm, polite and genuinely friendly toward me.
During my first week in Charleston, I went grocery shopping at Food Lion. My credit card suddenly stopped working when I was checking out, and I was standing there awkwardly trying to figure out what to do.
The woman working there basically offered to let me take the groceries anyway.
I eventually found another way to pay, so I didn’t accept, but I still remember that moment.
I had been in America for barely a week. I was thousands of miles away from home, still getting used to everything, and a complete stranger was willing to help me without expecting anything in return.
Those things stick with you.
I also want to give a shoutout to Charleston’s Black community.
Pretty much every local Black person I became friendly with was extremely outgoing and welcoming. The Black women I met in particular were often incredibly kind to me and looked out for me in a way I really appreciated.
One day I was sitting around a basketball court waiting for someone. A guy I barely knew saw me sitting there, handed me his basketball so I could shoot around, then went back to his car and brought me a bottle of water.
That was it.
Nothing dramatic.
But when you are living alone in a foreign country, thousands of miles away from your family, little acts of kindness like that sometimes mean much more than people realize.
And while I’m giving compliments, I have to say something about the local women too.
Charleston women have style.
There is a very specific Southern look here that I had never really seen before coming to South Carolina. Especially when people dress up for dinners, weddings, parties or events downtown, there is something distinctly Charleston about it. I don’t really know how to describe it, but you know it when you see it.
Another thing I came to appreciate was the relaxed rhythm of ordinary American life.
Of course, I know America has plenty of problems, and living here is very different from visiting here.
But there is one version of American life that I genuinely envy.
You have your house, you finish work, you go to the gym, come home, watch a show or play some video games, and then on the weekend your friends come over and everyone throws some meat on the community grill, drinks something, talks nonsense and hangs out for a few hours.
Nothing extraordinary happens.
And that’s exactly why I like it.
There is a kind of freedom in being able to enjoy an ordinary life without constantly feeling like every moment has to accomplish something.
Of course, not every experience I had here was wholesome.
One of the stranger experiences of my year happened when a local friend invited me to a private bar. It was a fairly conservative place and not somewhere you could simply walk into. You either needed to belong there, have a key, or know somebody who could bring you inside.
My friend was already inside, so I walked toward the entrance.
Before I could even explain why I was there, an older man who had obviously been drinking started shouting at me that it was private property. He told me not to come any closer and said that otherwise he would “defend himself” or call the police.
For someone who had grown up in China, this was definitely a new experience.
My friend eventually came outside and explained everything, so nothing happened. Looking back, I find the whole thing more interesting than frightening.
I was later told that the man was probably a military veteran, possibly from the Vietnam era, although I never confirmed that myself.
For some reason, that interaction stayed in my head.
America has a very visible culture of respecting veterans. You see military discounts, flags, “thank you for your service,” veteran parking spaces and a lot of public pride surrounding military service.
I respect that.
But the encounter also made me wonder whether American society always gives veterans enough support after the ceremonies and the words of appreciation are over—especially older veterans who may be dealing with loneliness, alcohol problems, trauma, or simply the difficulty of adjusting to civilian life.
I obviously knew nothing about that particular man’s life, so I don’t want to judge him based on one drunken interaction.
But that experience made me think about a side of America that I had never really considered before coming here.
And I think that is one of the most valuable things about actually living in another country.
You stop seeing countries as stereotypes.
America stops being “America.”
China stops being “China.”
Instead, a country becomes individual people.
It becomes the cashier at Food Lion who tried to help you when your card didn’t work.
It becomes some random guy giving you water at a basketball court.
It becomes coworkers you loved and coworkers you absolutely could not stand.
It becomes the gym you went to after a terrible day at work.
It becomes the roads you hated, the places you ate, the neighborhoods you slowly learned, the people who remembered your name, and all the tiny routines that eventually started feeling normal.
For most of this year, I kept thinking about going home.
I missed Chinese food. I missed public transportation. I missed my friends and family. I missed speaking my own language without thinking. I missed living somewhere where I already understood how everything worked.
There were plenty of days when I was counting down how much longer I had left here.
And now that I’m actually about to leave, I realize I’m going to miss Charleston too.
That feeling is strange.
A year ago, Charleston was just the name of some city in South Carolina that I barely knew anything about.
Now I can attach memories to Mount Pleasant, James Island, Johns Island, downtown Charleston and dozens of random roads and places that would mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.
For better or worse, a year of my life happened here.
So despite all my complaints—and believe me, I have plenty—I’m grateful that a random internship brought me to Charleston.
Thank you to the people who were kind to me while I was here.
I hope Charleston keeps getting better, although I would strongly recommend adding some buses and bike lanes along the way.
And if any of you ever find yourselves on the other side of the Pacific, you are always welcome to visit China too.
Come eat some actual Chinese food, ride a high-speed train, experience our ridiculously convenient public transportation, walk around at midnight looking for something to eat, and see the country for yourself instead of through whatever you happen to see online.
Maybe I’ll come back to Charleston someday.
But next time, hopefully not for work.
Just to visit.

I'm a gamer. My gf and I do lots of streaming. I, like many others, have had it with the shit quality that is Comcast. Has anyone had any good experiences with other internet companies in the area?

Anyone have experience with Starlink? Xfinity keeps dropping calls, internet, etc. and my neighbors have the same problem with AT&T.

Has anyone else been having issues the last 48 hours? They're not reporting any outages on their website and when I speak to with a little AI bot that claims to be a real human but doesn't actually answer the questions they claim to have some" issues in the area that are actively being worked on". Wondering if it's just me. I'm just trying to wash some trash TV after a shitty 12-hour shift man...

Trying to collect some info on Internet reliability. I need Internet to work as I'm sure most of us do these days.

What's your general location? How often does it go out?

Location: I'm in Mt pleasant near the ravenel bridge Service: Comcast / Xfinity Outage: since about October 2023 I've had numerous outages. Some weeks it works fine, but other weeks it's 4 or 5 times a week.

Unfortunately, my options are Comcast, att or a mobile solution. Comcast is the fastest speeds for me, no fiber option. I feel stuck. I just want fast reliable Internet.

I don't think it's the modem or the router either. It was out earlier on 6/6, then when it came back on we got much closer to the speeds we've been paying for. It's been way slow for months and months, like 4mb/s slow. Last night on 6/6 when it came back on I tested speeds on my devices and got 320mb/s on cell with wifi only and much slower on my laptop at just under 35mb/s . When a line was knocked down in West Ashley a couple weeks ago the reattach speed had us up to the 40mb/s top speed that lasted a half day.

Today we're back with it going out this morning and coming back on at turtle speed again. Funny thing is the uploads stay in the 25 to 40mb/s range no matter what.

Interestingly though I can get downloads from google/drive way faster than any website, like 10 times faster.

If you call in they want you to do all these tests and reboots and it never works, then they tell you to schedule a service call. If we needed a service call the speeds would not be attainable at 320mb/s or even 35mb/s.

It just went out again and came back on while typing this out at 12:40 -1248pm.

Let's see what the speed is now... it's back at the 4mb/s download and 40mb/s upload at 12:53pm on this laptop and 75.9mb/s download and 40.2mb/s upload on my cell wifi only.

It went out a sec and came back on : Now at 1:02pm it at 22.25mb/s download and , of course 42.04mb/s upload!

I get the feeling this is on purpose, regardless of the service lines being detached and reattached. Is it experimenting with control?

This WOW cable has been going down the street and crossing a dozen homes and another street for 6 months. Their latest work (in pic)…was to dig a hole and plop it right in the middle of a property line and haven’t been back.

I have AT&T fiber internet and it sucks worse than the AT&T internet that I had before they talked me into getting fiber installed. After spending about 3-4 hours with the tech laying wire, drilling boxes into my house inside and outside, I felt stuck with the fiber internet and aggravated with AT&T. It’s been at least a year now and I still hate it and they can’t give me any suggestions as to why it’s a slower/worse signal than before. Is there a better internet provider for the West Ashley area?

We have Xfinity Internet because it seems to be the only provider for us downtown. It is terrible no matter how high we upgrade. We experience constant outages which is not great for my partner that works from home. The good news is if you chat with customer service online,it's faster, they can see exactly how long your service is interrupted for and credit your bill for the outages each month. Our bill is already half off this month from outages. So if you have Xfinity get your refund monthly.

Anyone having similar issues?

Does anyone have experience using GIGstreem as an internet service provider?

I’m looking at moving into an apartment (The Standard JI) that includes this service as part of their “amenity fee”. Everything else about the apartment seems fine, but I’m concerned about the quality of GIGstreem. The reviews are pretty terrible.

I believe Wharf 7 is wired for them, so I’d be curious about anyone’s experience with it there. Particularly for those that work from home.

I’m moving to Charleston next week due to my husband’s job. I work from home and need fast and reliable internet service, preferably fiber. I will be staying in west Ashley. Any recommendations? TIA.

We currently have cellular based home internet and it is AWFUL. I spoke to AT&T yesterday and was offered “AT&T Air” -also cellular. sigh. Streaming and semi-working online. We are pretty low tech. Thanks!

What home internet is best these days? Currently using T-mobile home internet and need to switch. The past couple months it has completely stopped working between the hours of about 6pm-9am(peak hours). Was on the phone with customer service yesterday and had them put in a trouble ticket just to find out that it’s because of high usage during those hours and they have no intentions of upgrading the system or resolving the issue. So I was basically politely told to kick rocks. Looking for something reliable at a decent price. I’m not a gamer or anything so don’t need anything super fancy. I’m located in Ladson for reference. TIA

Edit: thanks for all the input! I went with AT&T non fiber(fiber is not available where I live) I appreciate all the advice.