diff --git a/goodtables/datatable/datatable.py b/goodtables/datatable/datatable.py
index 9834988581..40d9027515 100644
--- a/goodtables/datatable/datatable.py
+++ b/goodtables/datatable/datatable.py
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
 import io
 import codecs
 import datetime
-import chardet
+import cchardet as chardet
 import xlrd
 import csv
 from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
@@ -248,7 +248,7 @@ def _detect_stream_encoding(self, stream):
             sample = stream.read(sample_length)
             stream.seek(0)
 
-        encoding = chardet.detect(sample)['encoding']
+        encoding = chardet.detect(sample)['encoding'].lower()
         # default to utf-8 for safety
         if encoding == 'ascii':
             encoding = 'utf-8'
diff --git a/requirements/base.txt b/requirements/base.txt
index 0c63096994..59b8eb9b36 100644
--- a/requirements/base.txt
+++ b/requirements/base.txt
@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 click==3.3
 requests==2.5.1
 jsonschema==2.4.0
-chardet==2.3.0
+cchardet>=1.0.0
 xlrd>=0.9.3
 tellme>=0.2.4
 jsontableschema>=0.5.1