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.)
I want the Upstream (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [fairsoftware.net]
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I'm almost ready to boycott the internet.
Every other country in the world can get symmetric broadband by now.
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Every other country in the world can get symmetric broadband by now.
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.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean outside of the industrialized world?
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Occum's razor [wikipedia.org]
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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.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You got ripped off by your government. If the ISPs didn't hold their part of the bargain they should be forced to give the money back with interest. That would probably mean all of them going bankrupt, which is good because new, small companies can then take over. Small companies are prone to listening to their customers because that is what they need to survive.
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no no! not what i'm saying at all.
fill in the blank: early adopters get ____ed.
our greedy companies, municipalities, and people bought into a technology. they don't want to see their investment wasted...so they are reluctant to upgrade.
i do tech in a school district. this happens all the time: i go to trash some old gear to make room for new gear. someone stops me and says "we paid a lot of money for this!" this attitude is pervasive and by no means american...doesn't matter if we run T1 in the era of WAN-P
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You are an ISP. You just went into debt up to your ass for a huge bank of 56k modems. No problem, this new internet thing will make you rich.
About a quarter way through paying the loans, some damn fool invents DOCSIS and ADSL. You can't get more loans for new gear, and half your customers just left. Congrats, you are 90% of the ISP's from the late 90s.
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...Why should the most powerful country on the Earth, home to Microsoft, Apple, AND Google, be behind ANYBODY on broadband internet services?
Because we leverage inequity.
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.
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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?
Umm, because sensible people think that if you spend money on X then you can't spend the that money on Y? Of course, governments are not sensible so you end up with the fractional reserve banking system.
That only applies if money is fixed (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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I'm glad you're able to use the "occasional" benefit to type your messages on the Internet. If putting money towards civilian efforts is faster, why didn't some other country beat the USA to the Internet?
The issue is not military spending. It is a decision to allow private companies to control the expansion of broadband to civilian homes rather than the government. Undo that one decision and everything changes.
Yeah, that "occasional civilian benefit" line caught my eye as well. The interesting thing about the United States is that it has been far more willing to share the wealth when it comes to commercial spinoffs of once-military technologies than, say, the old Soviet Empire. The world has benefitted greatly from the Internet (of course), satellites (weather prediction, communications, research, you name it) and lots of other applications of technologies that the U.S. originally developed for military purposes.
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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.
That dark fiber is not running to your house. Lighting some intercity cable isn't going to give you a speed boost.
Re:I want the Upstream (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, it isn't like that money is thrown away...lots of companies and US citizens working for them make money off those wars....a great deal of it is pumping money back into the US economy.
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As for pop. density, try Oz. Ours sucks even in the populated areas.
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.
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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.
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When I lived in Provo, UT I got 15/15 for $40 per month and a $100 setup fee. Now I live in Texas and I get 10/1 for $65 through Charter. It makes me sad.
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Their 20/20 plan is $65/month.
I live in a small town in Iowa, and $65/month gets me 100/100 + phone. (They refuse to unbundle it completely -- it's that or pay more and get TV instead of, or TV with, that phone.)
Actual, real Internet connectivity may be less than that, I'm not sure. However, I have gotten sustained 11 megabyte per second transfers between home and work, with both on the same ISP. That's video data, over scp -- so while there is compression happening, I doubt it's doing much.
Doesn't seem quite full-duplex -- I'm getting
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What I love about charter is how they don't make secret deals with the RIAA as far as I know. They sell you internet access, you get it. Deal is done.
I wish I could get charter where I am at.
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]
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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.
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It was nice being on campus at my undergrad school during winter break... at one point I was one of about 10 people sharing the huge pipe the school had (multiple 1Gbps connections), in order to normally feed 16,000 students and staff. The on-campus network was 100mbps ethernet, so ~12MBps down and up.
In order for Remote Desktop to my Windows machine to run smoothly, I had to limit my BitTorrent client to 2MBps down, 500kBps up. That was nice... :)
Now I'm in the Real World (tm), and I have my Comcastic (tm)
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Not to brag - I actually fear what might happen if some worm or hacker gets access to such high-speed network...
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Well, I'm going to brag.
http://liscofiber.com/ [liscofiber.com]
$65/mo, 100 mbit, seems to be down and up. It's just shameful -- I can scp files between home and work faster than I used to be able to scp them around a LAN.
In Sweden ... (Score:2)
Bredbandsbolaget charges 349 SEK for this including telephony (which normally cost 125 SEK by the regular network.)
349 Swedish kronor = 43.616973 U.S. dollars
Normal price is written as 399 sek for 60 mbps, 50 sek for telephony and 100 sek off the price.
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40 mbps up? With what? The regular ethernet stuff? We're not on 10 mbps up longer?
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Also isn't the price for the ethernet option 320? You pay 270 because you have SIP thru them? Or what? Why haven't anyone told me? For how long has this been?
I pay 75 SEK for my "call all swedish landlines free"-SIP, but I'd switch in an instant if I'll pay -50 SEK :D
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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.
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Also, If most servers you connect to are no where near that it's a waste.
I have 100 mbit, and I can tell you that while most servers aren't anywhere near that, it's not a complete waste. I can run torrents without even thinking about whether I'm lagging others in the house -- I'm not. Ditto for YouTube, or just about anything else.
And, plenty of sites will let you download as much as you like.
And then with Charter hating P2P people, you wont get any faster Torrents.
Yeah, there is that. And with Charter actively inserting ads, it won't be much good for legit surfing, either.
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Only if too many people use it at once. And why would they? How many hours per day of high-def video will each household be streaming? That's approximately the total amount of bandwidth that people can use. Once people have at least that much upstream and downstream, the need is met and anything more is likely to go unused.
You might think my argument
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What I'd love is the upload bandwidth of 5 Mbit/s
It would be nice (I live in NYC and the largest upload link I can get at home is 512kbps), but I don't think 5Mbps is enough to be all that pleased. FiOS, on the other hand, is offering a symmetric 20Mbps connection for $70/month.
I know we're probably in the minority, and that the majority of people probably don't care much about upload speeds. But it's not that small of a majority, I don't think.
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Full power (Score:5, Funny)
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A juicy point from the article. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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and if the majority of your customers are stressed enough to consider scaling back to dial-up at $10/mo what then?
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I was stuck with these bastards for a year. They went out of their way to get file sharers (this was two years ago before it was cool), had terrible speeds (we were lucky to get 100 kbps down and we were on a 10Mbps plan), and frequent outages.
It was slower to connect to my school's servers from two blocks away than from 2000 miles away in Michigan (using a Comcast "5Mbps" connection that was 2/3 the price)
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There are a few left. I gave Adelphia (now Comcast) the boot and went with DSL from a local telecom. 6Mbit down, 1MBit up... but it tends to be faster than Adelphia ever was with their supposed 8Mbit, and I get some of the best tech-support and customer-service I've ever experienced.
Might as well enjoy it while it lasts I suppose. I had the same thing recently with my cell company (Unicel) until they were just bought out by AT&T *barf*.
Lulz (Score:4, Informative)
Charter stock trades at 9 cents a share today. That's up from 8 cents yesterday.
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So they increased shareholder value by over 10%? That's a pretty sweet deal, I would have been all over that if I knew it was going to happen.
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60/5 meg (Score:2, Insightful)
And with what limitation?
If its anything like comcast you can burn thru that in no time. Top speed ratings are worthless if you cant actually use it.
chapter 11 (Score:5, Informative)
"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy."
Charter Communications [wikipedia.org]
Re:chapter 11 (Score:4, Funny)
Now it says:
"On January 28, 2009, Charter Communications reportedly set up us the bomb."
Speed isnt everything (Score:5, Informative)
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What's the big deal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah, but then I'd be living in Finland.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
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things work differently here in the U.S.
improvements in consumer broadband is hard to come by when all your major ISPs are plagued by internal corruption [wikipedia.org] & incompetence [wikipedia.org]. of course, the high prices & poor quality of service just get blamed on file-sharers and power users. that way nothing ever gets fixed, and you never have to improve your operations.
it's so bad that some communities have had to resort to simply sidestepping private ISPs and setting up municipally-run public ISPs. that's about the on
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.
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Shame /. isn't a US centric site~
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Shame /. isn't a US centric site~
You forgot the "Oh wait ..."
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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.
What, are you trying to make us feel bad? This is a U.S. Web site discussing a U.S-centric article about a specific U.S. Internet Service Provider. What was your point again?
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What was your point again?
It's interesting. Not everything is about the size of your e-penis.
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No...slashdot is a global web site.
There are plenty of articles from outside the US
Swedish professors "censored" by Israeli company [slashdot.org]
Red Dwarf [slashdot.org] (need I say more?)
ISP in Ireland in bed with RIAA [slashdot.org]
Dutch pirates [slashdot.org] ("arrrrrr")
no matter how high tech the US is (moreover, the silicon valley)...it is so rudimentary when it comes to Internet speeds (and I'm referring to just the high population density locations).
shoot...the east coast has fiber deployment and higher cable speeds while we in the silicon valley have crap.
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No...slashdot is a global web site.
Which is all irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is a specific U.S Internet provider. What was your point again?
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The EONet one is as follows (per their price page [eonet.jp])
100Mbit is ï¥4900 a month (roughly US$54 at today's ï¥90 to US$1 rate).
200Mbit is ï¥5500 a month (roughly US$61)
1Gbit is ï¥8700 a month (roughly US$97)
And Japan's internet speeds being faster than the US is just one of many countries that have faster internet than the US.
Sweden, Finland, South Korean, etc.
What is the cap? Can you only get 60meg in off hou (Score:2)
What is the cap? Can you only get to the max of 60meg in off hours?
Charter's Goin' DOWN... (Score:4, Informative)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008683150_charter29.html [nwsource.com]
Why the lame upload? (Score:2, Interesting)
two words (Score:2)
RIAA/MPAA
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COULDN'T CARE LESS.
Holy Shnikeys! (Score:2)
It's cable. (Score:4, Informative)
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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
cool... (Score:2)
But call me back when you have 60/60 at a reasonable price.
In Southeast Michigan... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Corruption, bribery, and malfeasance in office. Obviously Comcast put in the winning bid.
Any more questions?
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
We know. We don't care. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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My family has four older cars, so if I were living in Japan I'm sure I could effectively multiply my rent by three to figure what it costs to register/store/insure them. I guess it's cultural bias, but if I were in charge of manufacturing cars I would be glad to show that 20-30 year old ones still work great. For that matter I h
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I can't compare with the US. But I can compare with living in a major Australian city.
Rent per square meter is much higher in Tokyo; this is undeniable. But:
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.
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.
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I guess it's just me
Lucky you. Best I can do is 18 down, 1 up with AT&T U-Verse.
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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.
Re:Is it just me, or is this slow? (Score:5, Funny)
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...)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Ah, Florida, the SPAM state. Kinda makes sense when you think about it. You guys need the bandwidth to stay in business ;^)
"This isn't Russia. Is this Russia? This isn't Russia."
(Sorry, couldn't resist that obligatory quote, even though I live across the bay from St. Petersburg)
Who cares about Chapter 11? (Score:2)
If they go out of business, then you don't pay.
Most likely someone will buy them the bankruptcy and they will need to honor the previous contract for consumers.
Now, I wouldn't pay any in advance.
Well that explains it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Well that explains it... (Score:4, Insightful)
It figures that only a company run by a Microsoft exec could actually make my blood boil worse than Comcast.
Allen was co-founder and left Microsoft in 1983. He's hardly to blame for what's happened since.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have Charter and routinely have charges that don't add up. Only those $2 agent fees of course... agents that I never talk to because they don't know anything (although that's every ISP)? And once my Internet went down and after a few phone calls to Charter, they sent over a technician under the understanding that if it was due to a problem on my side of the network (I.e. cables, my LAN, etc.) then I would have a charge, however, if the problem lay on their end, they would not charge me. Turns out they acc
Money Down? (Score:2)
Money down? I see no mention of 'money down' anywhere except the FUD warning. You pay your monthly fee, and you get your internet. There's nothing to be scared of.
Actually, dial up would be fine for me (Score:2)
A PuTTy ssh session just doesn't need all that much speed.
Re: (Score:2)
True, but it does benefit from low latency.
The typical dial-up connection would have enough latency to make an interactive shell a bit annoying (I've done plenty of SSH-over-dialup). You can work around it by writing little scripts and then uploading them (or pasting them into the console window) instead of typing everything into the console manually, but it's still annoying.
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.
done with Charter, down with Charter (Score:2, Insightful)
I had Charter for years before Verizon brought FiOS into the area. It wouldn't matter if they had quantum routers that somehow got the internet to me microseconds before someone finished writing it; I am not enough of a sadist to do business with that black hole of customer service ever again.
If Comcast is really worse than Charter as I hear, I literally weep for their subscriber base.
Cable can compete against FIOS (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
HD TV has NOTHING to do with the changeover (Score:2)
standard definition, and high definition programming will still be available after the changeover.
what is changing is the frequencies available to transmit the signal-- and the format of the signal.
the fact that a station is only available in regular resolution does not mean it won't be available on changeover day.
http://www.dtv.gov/consumercorner.html#faq6 [dtv.gov]
If I want a new TV, will I have to buy a High Definition TV (HDTV) to watch digital broadcast television after the transition?
No. It is important to unde
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