Most of the bad things people wrote in these reviews are true. Its unfortunate, and I considered moving again the first month I was here. If you're considering this place look at EVERYTHING in detail. For example, I found out that the previous tenants had a dog or cat because there's still fur all around the corners and in the carpets. I guess they just hold on to that pet deposit!

My biggest complaint, and something I think they should be up front about before you move in is the TV/Internet.

First, the TV.. its piss poor quality. Every channel seems to have different volumes, a lot of channels are fuzzy and you have ghosting from other channels, and some of the colors on other channels are to dark. The local cable company here is Adelphia/Comcast. They provide service RIGHT ACROSS THE STREET to the family homes, but for some reason they can't provide service to this place (so they say). Every time there's a storm you lose some channels and it takes weeks for them to correct it. Yes its satellite, provided by DirectTV I'm sure, and they distribute it to the whole complex and include a (probably overpriced) $30 fee in your rent.

Second, as you can imagine since there's no real cable service here your internet is also satellite. Its provided by some company called Hyperband based in Atlanta (why''). If you have an xbox or ps3 or a computer and you enjoy playing games online you can forget about it. There's inherent latency in satellite based internet that causes games to LAG badly and there's NO WAY to prevent it or make it better. You're at the mercy of the weather basically. In terms of bandwidth, I had to make more than 10 calls to Hyperband's (non)technical support, and while they were all friendly.. they didn't know jack. They'll run you through the whole "check your PC, reboot, check for viruses" routine and blame the bad service on you basically. The bandwidth they provide is supposedly 3mbit, but you're lucky if you break 2mbit. For the first 2 months I was here my upload and download were both at around 800Kb/s. After all those calls someone finally did something, and now they're providing enough bandwidth to actually download stuff. The worst part is they contacted me by phone about the card on my account being declined... but 3 months AFTER the fact. They claimed they were doing me a favor by not charging me (like they could anyway') because of my complaints about the service. The person I spoke to on the phone was a jackass, and while they charged me for the two months of service they added on a LATE FEE. WOW

There's NO alternatives for internet. I've checked everything... believe me. For TV you can get your own directTV service if you're facing the right direction... but they won't remove the cable charge from your rent.

User Responses
From: Anonymous	Date: 08/30/2007
I guess they lowered the fee for cable, b/c we're being charged 45 dollars/month for ours. If the TV is "acting up" or TV shows that I want to watch are not on, I'll just turn it off, b/c I've been told in the past that no one in the office knows how to fix the problems. BUT, WE ARE PAYING FOR SERVICE, and WE ARE NOT GETTING WHAT WE PAY FOR! This place will include anything in your rent if they can make a HUGE profit on it. They are stealing from their own residents, in my opinion, and someone will answer for that, eventually.
From: Anonymous	Date: 12/16/2007
If you live here, call hyperband relentlessly and complain about their service. They say they have planned upgrades in December but I'm skeptical that will happen. After about 20 calls and complaining to the leasing office a dozen times I was able to get them to contact management at hyperband so they could answer some of my questions. Unfortunately they weren't interested in answering anything, they just wanted to call me and lower my rate from the ridiculous ~50 some a month to just $24 a month. Considering they were so willing to lower my rate, I believe they just wanted to get me off their back and shut me up. But everyone should be paying the same $24/mo or less for the poor service they provide. Tenants should also know that Camden makes money off of their contract with hyperband. If you check hyperband's parent company's website (pcodatasolutions.com) they have links to their service contracts and you can easily calculate how much they're making off of their tenants. I don't imagine anyone would be happy to know that they're being overcharged so Camden can make an extra buck. If you're unhappy with this service please make Camden/Hyperband aware of it!
From: Anonymous	Date: 12/31/2007
I believe if the tenants came together and threatened a class action suit against Camden/Hyperband for breach of contract and false advertising, perhaps that would make them more attentive. It's quite simple really. Hyperband guarantees their product above a minimum speed, which it consistently fails to meet; at least 256/128 Kbps based on your plan (check the FAQ section of their site). Failing to meet this guarantee consistently (daily) is a clear breach of contract by Hyperband. One can then easily and conveniently bring Camden into the suit as they are providing the service and under contract with Hyperband. Further, Camden continues to advertise high-speed internet as a selling point to new residents knowing that the current minimum service gaurantee set by Hyperband cannot be maintained [and Hyperband has breached its own contractual guidelines]. Thus, Camden is guilty of failing to provide full disclosure to new residents regarding the state of the internet service and the known breach by Hyperband of its contractual agreement with its customers.
From: Anonymous	Date: 01/11/2008
I've been a tenant here for over 2 years, and I have to agree completely with the reviews mentioned above. The in-house cable TV service is awful. Forget about high def television - their offerings are worse than standard definition basic cable. The picture is snowy/fuzzy with intermittent outages, and you're forced to pay for it even if you have your own DirecTV dish. And the broadband (provided by Hyperband) is downright abysmal. I average about 60k to 128k per second when downloading - far worse than my DSL connection from over 7 years ago! And I'm paying over $50 per month for a 3 megabit connection. As others mentioned above, those averages mean nothing when you're trying to play PC or Xbox/PS3 games online because there is so much latency and packet loss. My wife plays World of Warcraft and her ping times are often over ONE THOUSAND miliseconds! Don't bother calling support, because depending on the day, they either tell you everything is working normally or "yeah we're upgrading soon with additional capacity." They've been telling me that for 2 years now. I've been hoping it would get better but it seems the only solution is to move. I'll be out of there in the Spring. Oh and finally, they're forcing everyone to pay $30 per month for a service called "garbage valet." It's another ridiculous service designed to generate revenue for Camden. You can't opt out of it even if you want to take out your own garbage. Avoid this place at all costs.
From: Anonymous	Date: 01/28/2008
Hyperband relies on one or two rented T1 lines (1.5mbps each) to provide bandwidth for the WHOLE complex. This is of course only my guess from looking at contract material on PCO's site, mainly because Hyperband refuses to answer what the total aggregate bandwidth to this complex is or tell me the user contention ratio (how many people per some unit of bandwidth). However, if I'm right, and all 288 apartments in Camden Silo Creek share the same 3mb of bandwidth it becomes obvious why network performance is so poor. If we assume all 288 apartments have 1 computer, and everyone is downloading something at the same time, using Hyperband's wildly optimistic figure of 3Mb (3145728 bits) divide by 288, and we get ~10,922 bits or 10.66Kb of bandwidth available to each person. Thats about 5 times slower than a 56k dial-up connection. Even if we cut the figure in half, 144 or even 96 people downloading, the available bandwidth per person is 21Kb or 32Kb respectively. These numbers are extremely low, and Hyperband knows this. The only reason they can get away with providing such minimal bandwidth is that most people just browse the web, not download large files. They know that number of downloading users will be relatively small, and the novice user won't notice anything but a slightly slower loading of webpages. But for those that do download or play games online, its very obvious. At peak time (3:30-6pm) when most of us want to use the internet ping times will reach into the 700ms range or worse, and file transfer speeds will drop down to 100-500kb/s. There's also a substantial amount of packet loss during this time which makes games increasingly problematic. I'd like to see litigation brought against Hyperband, but most cable ISPs use these same estimates to design home or town-home networks. Cable internet in areas like Ashburn are also shared, they're just not as unwisely managed or allocated to the people in the neighborhood. That said, those home owners will notice service degradation on peak time as well, just not to this extreme. And a GOOD provider would not mind sharing user contention information with you, they have nothing to hide. Hyperband on the other hand is in the business to screw people that don't know any better. Sadly, the contract we enter when signing up for service explicitly states "HBN makes no warranties of any kind, whether expressed or implied, for the services, software or hardware it is providing." which I believe protects them from any liability, but I'm no lawyer...
From: Anonymous	Date: 06/09/2008
Sure there is an alternative to the internet situation, get a USB wireless aircard from the wireless service provider of your chioce.

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