Charter Launches 60 Mbps Service

ndogg writes "While other companies are throttling their services, and capping bandwidth, Charter Communications, the cable company, is launching a 60/5 Internet service, starting in St. Louis, MO. It's certainly not cheap, starting at 129.99 per month (add another 10 if it's not being bundled with television or phone.) Currently, it's the fastest down stream speed available, and being a cable company, they potentially have greater reach than FiOS." However, there may be a risk to putting too much money down on this service; Charter Communications as a company faces some serious financial problems right now. As reader Afforess writes, "rumors abound that Paul Allen may just cut his losses and run," by selling the company. (Allen is the majority stockholder.)

Comments

I want the Upstream

[alain94040]

I don't care so much about the download speed of 60 Mbit/s (although it would allow streaming of live HD, which requires 6 - 10 Mbit/s sustained).

What I'd love is the upload bandwidth of 5 Mbit/s. Forget about file swapping: the killer app for the family is video conferencing that works. Can you see me? I'm tired of the pixellized, ugly, breaking video chat on skype.

Of course, I wouldn't trust a soon-to-be-bankrupt provider on anything, especially the promise that they don't plan to throttle the traffic. Yeah, right!

--
5 Reasons You Shouldnâ(TM)t Incorporate Your Business

Re:I want the Upstream

[Chabo]

You mean outside of the industrialized world?

Re:I want the Upstream

[gandhi_2]

Also, it's fairly well known that early adopters take the R&D hit. That was us....we invested all the infrastructure that made it all possible. Other countries got to buy in once the tech was refined, and weren't saddled with old-investment gear.

Re:I want the Upstream

[QuantumG]

Why is it that you people always try to sell Americans on the idea that we spent all our money on wars and thus must have less than you in other areas?

Umm, because sensible people think that if you spend money on X then you can't spend the that money on Y? Of course, governments are not sensible so you end up with the fractional reserve banking system.

Re:I want the Upstream

[gandhi_2]

no no! not what i'm saying at all.

fill in the blank: early adopters get ____ed.

our greedy companies, municipalities, and people bought into a technology. they don't want to see their investment wasted...so they are reluctant to upgrade.

i do tech in a school district. this happens all the time: i go to trash some old gear to make room for new gear. someone stops me and says "we paid a lot of money for this!" this attitude is pervasive and by no means american...doesn't matter if we run T1 in the era of WAN-PHY...someone payed good money for that T1 CSU/DSU.

Re:I want the Upstream

[gandhi_2]

Lets say you start a company. You own the company, it is your property...like your skateboard or television. You have the right, because you own it, to do with it as you see fit.

Now you hire an employee. You agree to a contract that specifies certain work/compensation terms, which may/may not include paid vacation. You don't have to offer those things....the person doesn't have to sell you his/her work. That contract is property of you both.

Now here comes the government. "You have to give them 60 days of paid vacation." Nice...so the company what WAS your property now has the government making decisions. That is NOT liberty.

happiness

That happiness is a result of governments making great choices for you, or you making good choices for yourself?

Like I said, America was set up for liberty. It wasn't set up to give stuff to people who can't be asked to get it themselves. I'm not like some people, claiming the US is #1 at this or that. I don't care. If fiber-to-my-doghouse, as cool as that would be, means having governments controlling every facet of life...then you can keep it.

This all aside the fact that France, for example with it's silly labor laws, ran about 9.5-11% unemployment BEFORE the recession. Hiring someone there is a major liability because you don't own your own property. Protectionism is the only thing keeping French employed. But hey, feel free to continue your march toward a proletarian utopia.

Re:I want the Upstream

[cayenne8]

"You can't have both. Or in other words: Because you spent all the money on wars."

Well, it isn't like that money is thrown away...lots of companies and US citizens working for them make money off those wars....a great deal of it is pumping money back into the US economy.

Re:I want the Upstream

[tsa]

You got ripped off by your government. If the ISPs didn't hold their part of the bargain they should be forced to give the money back with interest. That would probably mean all of them going bankrupt, which is good because new, small companies can then take over. Small companies are prone to listening to their customers because that is what they need to survive.

A juicy point from the article.

[palegray.net]

According to Fawaz, Charter will not impose bandwidth-usage caps on any of its high-speed Internet subscribers. By contrast, Comcast's policies limit users to 250 Gigabytes of data consumption per month.

Nice. Very nice. I guess there are providers out there interested in competing on the technical merits of their service, while giving the consumers what they want.

60/5 meg

[nurb432]

And with what limitation?

If its anything like comcast you can burn thru that in no time. Top speed ratings are worthless if you cant actually use it.

What's the big deal?

[JoonasD6]

Come to Finland. http://www.welho.fi/homes/broadband/cableandadslbroadbandsubscriptions/welho100m/tabid/72495/Default.aspx We've had that for about a year now. Oh, and look: http://www.welho.fi/homes/broadband/cableandadslbroadbandsubscriptions/welho110m/tabid/72504/Default.aspx

We know. We don't care.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

To all the people who are going to point out how much better broadband is elsewhere.

How much do you pay for an 1100 sq ft (102 m^2) apartment? How much do you pay for energy? For gas? For food?

Do you REALLY want to get in to a cost of living comparison between, say, Tokyo and here? Because I will GLADLY accept my crappy 12Mbps Comcast internet in exchange for 3-4 times more living space.

And, by the way, "gigabit" Internet service often isn't. My university has "gigabit" Internet service (in that the computer labs are wired with GigE and 10G uplinks), but the entire campus shares 4Gbps of Internet bandwidth. For anything but other universities (Internet2) or Akamai (local mirror), it's not significantly faster than the 12Mbps Comcast I have at my apartment. Of course, the fact that everyone is torrenting probably has something to do with that.

Re:Is it just me, or is this slow?

[Jherek Carnelian]

I guess it's just me, or the local market I live in, but I can get 50/5 fiber service for $80/month now. WiMAX services in the area offer up to 150/150

Gee thanks for all that info. Too bad you were so much more interested in talking about yourself than in actually passing any useful information along that you left out where your "local market" actually is.

Re:Well that explains it...

[Jherek Carnelian]

It figures that only a company run by a Microsoft exec could actually make my blood boil worse than Comcast.

Allen was co-founder and left Microsoft in 1983. He's hardly to blame for what's happened since.

That only applies if money is fixed

[Sycraft-fu]

It's not. Money is just a theoretical construct that helps facilitate trade. It isn't a magical, limited substance that makes something out of nothing. It is just a theoretical notion of stored value.

Thus on large scales it doesn't function as it does in your personal life. You find that situations where everyone spends more money, causes everyone to get more. Everyone does more, so more is produced so everyone has more wealth. You'll sometimes hear this referred to as "money velocity" meaning how fast it circulates through the economy. That is in fact a large part of the current recession: People and institutions are pulling in to their shells and spending less, which slows down the flow of money.

Also there is the fact that military spending has civilian benefits. One of them would be right on topic here: the Internet. It was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as ARPANET. They were researching highly resilient networks for government use, and out of that grew what is now the Internet. As a more directly military application there's GPS. It was developed to let the US military accurately locate vehicles, soldiers, bombs and so on. It is still owned and operated by the military. However since being opened to civilians it has become THE primary method of geolocation for everything. Aircraft, boats, etc all use GPS to figure out where they are and only use other systems should it fail. Maybe some day there'll be a non-military system as well in the form of the EU's Galileo but thus far it has been mired in politics and isn't up.

So it isn't as though military spending is some vast black hole form which money never returns. To look at it that way either means you have never looked at the civilian benefits that come from it (trauma surgery is another), that you don't understand economics on a large scale, or both.

Re:That only applies if money is fixed

[Wildclaw]

It's not. Money is just a theoretical construct that helps facilitate trade. It isn't a magical, limited substance that makes something out of nothing. It is just a theoretical notion of stored value.

You get some of it, but still manage to get the whole thing so wrong.

Yes, money is just paper. The real currency is everything that is produced in a country. And that is a limited resource. If you produce one thing you won't have time/resources to produce another thing. Of course, using trading you can make production more efficent. But only to a certain degree.

In the end however, money speaks the truth. If x% of your GDP goes to military spending, then that is x% that isn't spent on more useful things.

You find that situations where everyone spends more money, causes everyone to get more. Everyone does more, so more is produced so everyone has more wealth.

This is only true if you have serious unemployment or production downtime. And even then, the goverment is better off higher people for civilian purposes (like digging down infrastructure) than it is hiring people to blow up other countries.

Also there is the fact that military spending has civilian benefits

Sure, you get the occasional civilian benefit. But, again, you would be better off investing it towards civilian efforts immediatly, getting rid of the 90% that does little but blow up stuff.

that you don't understand economics on a large scale, or both.

Sounds like you are the one who don't understand economy on the big scale. Broken windows aren't good for the economy, even if allows the money to circulate more.

Re:That only applies if money is fixed

[ScrewMaster]

Sure, you get the occasional civilian benefit.

I'm glad you're able to use the "occasional" benefit to type your messages on the Internet. If putting money towards civilian efforts is faster, why didn't some other country beat the USA to the Internet?

The issue is not military spending. It is a decision to allow private companies to control the expansion of broadband to civilian homes rather than the government. Undo that one decision and everything changes.

Yeah, that "occasional civilian benefit" line caught my eye as well. The interesting thing about the United States is that it has been far more willing to share the wealth when it comes to commercial spinoffs of once-military technologies than, say, the old Soviet Empire. The world has benefitted greatly from the Internet (of course), satellites (weather prediction, communications, research, you name it) and lots of other applications of technologies that the U.S. originally developed for military purposes. We ought to get a little credit for the trillions of dollars in global economic development that have resulted from such investments on our part.

Anyone making the claim that United States military spending was of no benefit to the U.S. or the world is full of little red ants.

done with Charter, down with Charter

[TheFlamingoKing]

I had Charter for years before Verizon brought FiOS into the area. It wouldn't matter if they had quantum routers that somehow got the internet to me microseconds before someone finished writing it; I am not enough of a sadist to do business with that black hole of customer service ever again.

If Comcast is really worse than Charter as I hear, I literally weep for their subscriber base.

Re:Speaking as someone...

[Grem135]

Nothing wrong with St. Louis.... not sure about a place that charges $105 for a paltry 1.5/0.5 line.. just wonder what else they rape you for........ BTW, I pay $37 a month for my 10/1 meg line.... in St. Louis.. they dont throttle me and use as much of that BW as i can.... need some more hdds. lol