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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.)
I love the 20/20mb/s service i get with FiOS. My friends leech off my FTP at 1MB/s. and for only 70 USD. I wanted the upload, I could care less about down. I do cheer more competition in these speeds that can only help bring prices down across the board.
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So? In Sweden you can get 60-100/8-10 Mbps for $33.7 per month. Including phone and 10GB online backup.
Charter is the cable company in rural areas, while Comcast gets the major cities. This is one of those areas that I don't fully understand the legislation at the state level that would allow this. How does Comcast get Ann Arbor, Brighton, most of the Detroit suburbs and Charter has to handle the rural areas of Livingston, Jackson, Washtenaw, Wayne, etc.
What a brilliant deal for Comcast. They get densely populated areas where their return on infrastructure investments are the best, and where more affluent people live, and Charter gets to handle all the heavy lifting of running a cable network in the hard to reach places.
I always wondered how that cherry-pick arrangement came to pass, if any of you know, please respond because that would perhaps enlighten us as to Charter's financial woes.
On the flip side of that, I visited a datacenter for Charter and it was really nice, obvious they spent alot on it.
Oh, and BTW, Charter filed Chapter 11 yesterday.
Also it really does not matter much. If they dont have 1TB pipe running to the headends for the 60Mbps services it's gonna be saturated within minutes.
Also, If most servers you connect to are no where near that it's a waste. Sites like slashdot and others throttle individual users to keep you from sucking it all up for everyone else.
And then with Charter hating P2P people, you wont get any faster Torrents.
My 1.2mbps DSL at home is as fast as Comcast's 5mpbs when it comes to downloads and video streaming. So if they gave me 900mbps down It wont make a difference.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...Why should the most powerful country on the Earth, home to Microsoft, Apple, AND Google, be behind ANYBODY on broadband internet services?
Here at UCLA (which participates in Internet2 and CENIC and some other organizations), it's not uncommon to see 40 Mbps download/upload in offices and 25 Mbps download/upload through the campus-wide WiFi for students. I can get WinXP SP3 in around 5 seconds...
:/
Not to brag - I actually fear what might happen if some worm or hacker gets access to such high-speed network...
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
I'd never realized that Paul Allen had anything to do with Charter, let alone ran it. I admit that I did very little homework on them before signing up... just enough to find out they were the only viable broadband option available to me where I live (DSL is too far from a switch and therefore very slow, there are no other cable companies in the municipality because of an exclusivity contract, and there's simply no way I can afford a T# or satellite connection). I also soon found out that they're ridiculously overpriced, have terrible customer support, routinely underserve their customers and can't even manage a channel numbering system that remotely reflects the actual FCC granted channels the networks broadcast over.
It figures that only a company run by a Microsoft exec could actually make my blood boil worse than Comcast.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
This has nothing to do with it. Only to do with regional areas not having super fast broadband. The telco's just don't want to invest anymore, and with your economy as it is, well.... a large handout would be needed.
As for pop. density, try Oz. Ours sucks even in the populated areas.
I remember all the naysayers about how cable was doomed and that docsis 3.0 was vaporware, FIOS was supposed to be the next big thing. Well it came to my area as one of the first places in the nation and "mehhhh" is all I have to say, but luckily our city council has their heads screwed on straight and demanded more speeds/options for their citizens. FIOS could blow them out of the water, but they hold back or you have to cough up big bucks to get real fiber speeds.
As far as I can see, FIOS has laid down the fiber and they are still withholding speeds in a lot of areas where service is available.
Alone head to head FIOS has faster speeds, but might be a little more expensive and you have to sign a damn contract with them for a couple years.
I found my ping to actually be better on cable than the same FIOS line coming into the home, roommate has FIOS and I have cable internet because triple package is cheaper.
TWC is doing the same thing nationwide with the implementation of docsis 3.0, since they skipped 2.0.
Although to be honest, 99% of the websites/server out there do not even supply the speeds close to max out the connection of fiber. Everyone on FIOS trying to download at max speed will never work, streaming already works pretty good and this will be a glory to P2p/Warez scene.