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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.)
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.
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.