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

[mpaulsen]

"They sell you internet access, you get it. Deal is done.

Well, sure. Unless you count forging DNS results and deep packet inspection in order to insert ads into the sites you're visiting.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/15/0432259&from=rss
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/13/1832256

Re:I want the Upstream

[ScrewMaster]

Simple. Because they (you?) are the most powerful country (in military terms).

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

{sigh} 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? Your logic is faulty, and your conclusion suspect (although I'm sure it makes you feel all warm inside just thinking that Americans will never have faster broadband than you because we have more guns than you.) I hate to break this to you, but the two are not mutually exclusive. Anyway, there's your reality check (since yours has obviously bounced.)

This has zip to do with Federal expenditures on our military, and has everything to do with the private sector here being run by greedy fucks that are nickel-and-diming us back to dial-up, all the while doing their damnedest to offer us less for more. We're loaded with dark fiber at the moment (laid during the DotCom bubble) that, if it were actually lit up, would give us more than enough capacity to be competitive on the world scene. But it's kept dark because certain large corporations make more money by inducing artificial scarcity (kinda like the music industry, but that's a story for another day.) In fact, if you've been keeping up on your Slashdot, you'd know that our Telcos got about two hundred billion dollars in tax breaks, granted in exchange for their providing high-speed connections to all. They reneged on the deal ... but kept the money.

Simple, really. You just have to have a few facts at your command.

Re:I want the Upstream

[gandhi_2]

Because we were set up for liberty, not free bullshit. You want the government to give you everything? There are plenty of countries just waiting for you.

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.

Full power

[Panspechi]

Just plug it straight into my veins... oh yeah, that's the good stuff.

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.

Lulz

[Anonymous Coward]

Charter stock trades at 9 cents a share today. That's up from 8 cents yesterday.

chapter 11

[fredan]

from wikipedia:

"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy."

Charter Communications

Re:chapter 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it says:

"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly set up us the bomb."

Speed isnt everything

[sempiterna]

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.

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

fastest?

[MoFoQ]

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.

In Southeast Michigan...

[GPLDAN]

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.

Re:In Southeast Michigan...

[Gybrwe666]

Its very simple, really, and there is nothing sinister or state-regularted about it (which, in some minds, might be the same thing...

Charter grew up like every other cable provider: acquisition. Cable franchises are granted on a city (or county) by city (or county) basis. In other words, Charter (or a company it acquired) negotiated at some point with the municipalities in question and bought the rights to provide service.

So, they bought those cities.

Note that rural areas are generally much cheaper for a cable company to expand into. Two reasons: one, franchises are cheaper, because of the lower number of potential subscribers, and two, in a rural area the costs associated with building a system are *RADICALLY* cheaper. For instance, in the county of Charters HQ (St. Louis, County, Missouri) the average cost per foot (inclusive) to lay fiber is about $8/foot. (Okay, this was the cost in 2002, but it will suffice for this discussion.) However, if you across the river from St. Louis, into Southern Illinois (also Charter territory) the cost per foot averages about $2 per foot. (also 2002 figures). In other words, a sparsely populated, more rural or rural area *CAN* be a cheap acquisition and buildout for a provider. Obviously, this is dependent on simple cost-ratios, and there will come a point where an area is simply too underpopulated to cost-effectively support.

Also, you have to look at Charter's history to understand why they have lots of rural populations under their belts. The original founders, headed up by Jery Kent, all lived in rural areas of Missouri. When Paul Allen bought into the company, he had completely and totally bought into the "wired world" concept. As a result, between the founders (who desparately wanted service in areas nearly and hour from the edges of St. Louis), Jerry Kent, and the relative cheapness of such systems, there was a gold-rush mentality on these outlying systems that no one wanted.

So Charter ended up in lots of smaller systems and areas.

Not necessarily a bad business plan, just one they screwed up with some unrelated decisions much later.

Bill

Well that explains it...

[Miseph]

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.

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

[geekmux]

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...)

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:We know. We don't care.

[Yuuki Dasu]

The problem with your argument is that you assume that only Tokyo has good broadband. The whole country has amazing connectivity.

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?

I live in a city of about 80k people, about 45 minutes from Kyoto. I live alone in an apartment that's a very comfortable size for me - over 400 sq ft - and pay only about $400 a month in rent. Even in winter I only pay about $45 a month in electricity. Public transportation and my bike mean I don't even know offhand the price of gas. Food, I can cook for myself cheaply or go out to low-end restaurants for around $10.

My 50mbps cable costs me $40 a month.