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]

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.

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.

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

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.