Charter Launches 60 Mbps Service 299
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.)
Lulz (Score:4, Informative)
Charter stock trades at 9 cents a share today. That's up from 8 cents yesterday.
chapter 11 (Score:5, Informative)
"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy."
Charter Communications [wikipedia.org]
You're almost out of the past, American internet (Score:1, Informative)
We have this via VDSL in several countries in Europe since beginning of last year, for approx. 45-50 USD a month, but with an upstream of 5-20 mbps (depending on linenoise and distance to the DSLAM).
Speed isnt everything (Score:5, Informative)
fastest? (Score:5, Informative)
fastest? no.
As an example, there are several providers that have 1Gbps (1000Mbps) service in Japan
here's one [eonet.jp]
here's another [gate02.ne.jp]
Maybe the fastest for US cable internet companies thus far but it's nowhere near being the fastest, period.
Charter's Goin' DOWN... (Score:4, Informative)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008683150_charter29.html [nwsource.com]
It's cable. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:5, Informative)
"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 [slashdot.org]
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/13/1832256 [slashdot.org]
Is it just me, or is this slow? (Score:3, Informative)
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 (no, that's not a typo).
Local university speed tests are pushing 90 down and 80 up.
I guess I'm just lucky in my area. Always has seemingly been ahead of the bandwidth curve. Nothing against others offering this, as it's definitely fast.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:3, Informative)
You can get symmetrical speeds with FIOS. Their 20/20 plan is $65/month. Of course, the usual disclaimers about limited FIOS availability apply.
I use their 20/5 plan which is $10/month cheaper. 5 Mb/s is fast enough for all of the time critical upstream I need (VOIP and the occasional video call) and it's fast enough that I can get to a >1 share ratio on torrents in a reasonable amount of time. I'd rather put that $10 into savings instead.
Re:In Sweden ... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:2, Informative)
Charter is in bed with Universal and someone else.
I looked into it a few years back when my parents got a warning letter for downloading some movie.
(The letter was prompt and accurate.)
No idea about the music side of things.
Re:Why the lame upload? (Score:2, Informative)
COULDN'T CARE LESS.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:1, Informative)
More like because we're vastly bigger than all those other countries (combined), and with much lower population density.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
... but kept the money.
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
Simple, really. You just have to have a few facts at your command.
Re:It's cable. (Score:3, Informative)
The limit for one 256bit QAM is 38.8mbps. This means that Charter is using a second QAM channel (must be using a DOCSIS 3 modem) to provide the extra bandwidth. If anything, this effectively doubles the amount of bandwidth they have with only a select few customers taking full advantage of it.
At the Cable Expo in Philadelphia last summer, I saw demonstrations of 150mbps synchronous connections on coax cable using 4 QAM's.
Seems like if they do it right, all of their customers in this market will benefit from it.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:2, Informative)
What planet are you living on? Outside of Europe and Japan, everyone's at least as screwed as the US when it comes to broadband.
Every time I go into a supermartket, I'm beaten over the head with 100Mb/s service for about USD25 a month with a year contract. No caps. I don't know the upstream and I'm too lazy to switch off of my current service at about 50Mb/s for the same price.
XPeed. 100Mb/s. Add Korea to your list.
Yah, right! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:4, Informative)
yep, South Korea is also rolling out 100 Mbps symmetric broadband to residential subscribers. FttH is the future, but there's pretty much zero deployment here in the U.S. 100Mbps symmetric FttH is the standard [nxtcommnews.com] for municipal networks (something the U.S. is too backward to grasp, apparently) in Scandinavia and the "competitive bar" in France. it's the standard in Japan as well, but they're now upgrading residential connections to 1 Gbps.
most of these countries with advanced infrastructures have per-megabit rates well below $1.00--i think japan is around $0.22 per megabit, though KDDI is planning to offer (or is already offering) 1 Gbps at ¥5985/month, which translates to $66.21/month at the current exchange rate, or $0.06/Mbps. compare that with 60 Mbps at $129/month = $2.15/Mbps. though i suppose that's better than Comcast's 50 Mbps "wideband" service that's $150/month = $3.00/Mbps--and that's for asymmetric bandwidth.
and yet there are still people defending American ISPs' outmoded business model & outmoded thinking. instead of updating our communications infrastructure to accommodate the growing number of high bandwidth applications coming into the mainstream, ISPs are trying to artificially suppress the demand for bandwidth through packet shaping, bandwidth throttling, and generally controlling how people use their internet connections.
of course, those ISP apologists argue that residential internet connections should only be used for checking e-mail and surfing the web, which apparently doesn't include streaming media. it's like we're still stuck in the 90's. apparently, instead of the ISPs building/adapting their business model around consumer habits and current usage trends, it's the consumers who are supposed to change their internet usage habits to fit the ISPs' business model (of overselling & charging more for less).
we're basically sacrificing our society's technological progress to preserve the obsolete business models of companies with outdated attitudes about the internet. if it weren't for their near-unregulated monopolies, most of these companies would have tanked a long time ago.
Re:In Southeast Michigan... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:We know. We don't care. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:2, Informative)