Slashdot Mirror
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 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
Just plug it straight into my veins... oh yeah, that's the good stuff.
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.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Charter stock trades at 9 cents a share today. That's up from 8 cents yesterday.
from wikipedia:
"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy."
Charter Communications
As a previous charter customer, I wont ever re-subscribe to charter if I have the choice of providers. For the first year I had charter latency was worse than dial up. All their customer service would tell us is that "It's a known issue and it's bound to improve.. sometime." No credits, no refunds, just.. that's how it is, deal with it or cancel your account. After they upgraded their backbone, they blocked port 25, 80, 110, and most of the server ports inbound, and their upload speed was really, really poor. (5 mbs service, with 128k upload MAX) I would not want 60mbs internet if they blocked nearly everything I want to do on the internet.
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
fastest? no.
As an example, there are several providers that have 1Gbps (1000Mbps) service in Japan
here's one
here's another
Maybe the fastest for US cable internet companies thus far but it's nowhere near being the fastest, period.
Incedently, Charter is Paul Allen's company. They are bleeding money right now with a stock price of... EIGHT CENTS! They've been skirting insolvency for a few years now and the Securities and Exchange Commission is saying that if they fail to refinance some of their debt, they will be forced into bankruptcy.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008683150_charter29.html
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
This is a cable connection. Sure, they advertise 60Mbps, but your mileage will vary, namely far down. In the evening you will likely NEVER hit that, especially if a lot of people in your neighborhood are online. That'll saturate a shared cable region in no time. That and your latency is probably going to suck. Maybe I'm just bitter, but I just ditched Commiecast 8Mbps service for 7Mbps DSL and I'm happy as hell that I did. No more random connection drops, no more shitty latency spikes, just a clean connection so far. I hate cable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First off, as a fellow smart ass, I can recognize a compliment. Spank you very much.
Secondly, to answer your question, my local market is the Tampa Bay area.
(That would be in Florida.)
(Florida, the one in the United States.)
(In case you were wondering...)
Just from my personal experience with Charter.. in our area I had their 5MB down service and it sucked bad. I was getting just a tad above 56k modem speeds most times and I called support and lucky me, I wandered into a bunch of script reading droids in India. I got so pissed off, when I went and paid the bill I brought the modem with me and told them I canceled, for good.
I have AT&T DSL service now and I've been happy. (about 4 blocks from the switching office)
Personally they'll never be able to offer that fast of service here.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
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.
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.