Still waiting for Verizon's
FiOS to come and light up your neighborhood with blistering download speeds? Now you have something even faster to wait for, with Charter Communications announcing it is launching a 60Mbps broadband service, utilizing
DOCSIS 3.0 to fit more bits in the same pipes -- not quite the 160Mbps Comcast
predicted, but we'll take it. What the company isn't announcing is when people will be able to tap into this or how much they'll pay for the privilege, but hopefully it'll be a little less than the $140 Verizon is charging.
Update: We
found word of prices and, go figure, the service costs exactly the same as FiOS: $140 per month. But, you can save $10 if you bundle it with TV or phone service.
posted January 29th 2009 3:33PM
I just passed over my internet connection icon at the bottom of my screen with my mouse arrow, and it popped up "Local Area Connection Speed: 100 Mbps Status: Connected". This is a Verizon Fios connection. Looks OK to me! Who is Charter and why would I switch? This Verizon connection (bundled with HDTV and Phone) costs me about $150.00 per month for all three, and I have the option to increase the speed (increase the price also). My computer is so fast that when I use another connection/computer, I get bored waiting for the screens to change. Life is good!
Your funny, that is your LAN.Local Area Network..Your home network speed. Not WAN or in your case possible COAX "MOCA" which provideds internet connection coming into your location from provider.
You know, you can upgrade to even faster service by just swapping in a giganet ethernet card and a giganet switch. There'll be no stopping you then!
60 Mega bits per second. Do I understand correctly? Seriously. Charter couldn't deliver 60 Mega bits in a row, much less a second.
fuck charter, i had that in St. Louis and the company is garbage. I did get basic cable and internet for 29.99/ mon flat for 6 months after the initial business so then again i can't complain they made up for it. I still have a nasty taste however.
charter is terrible!
MBps = Megabytes per second
Mbps = Megabits per second
Some have this confused from reading above post, no names in particular just from reading.
yep and what ports/user restrictions on apps are they placing on their residential users.....?
I signed up for Charters 10 meg service in auburn al. Could never get anything faster than 4 or 5. The tech came by when I was out of town and my girl friend let them in. They had to ask ME, over the phone, where to do a speed test. They then told me it showed 9-10 meg speeds but closed the laptop when my girl friend went to look. I followed up, all the way to the regional head pooba and he told me they had not been able to get more than 5meg out of auburn to data. The tech freakin lied to my face, as such, AND charter was selling a service they KNEW that they could not offer. This is one of many complaints I have with Charter. They are truely a bunch of idiot's (for the most part), and dishonest to boot. I also believe that they eat babies.
KevinC.
why is this big news? The rest of 1st world already has this, pays a lot less, and we invented the interwebz? Doesnt South Korea has something like 1gig for 50 dollars US...or something ridiculous like that???
Comparing our situation to other countries does not make for a valid argument. South Korea is basically one densely populated city.
What is holding back the US is our early adoption of technology. We laid a very robust infrastructure for the time well before most countries. We now have to deal with that aging technology that criss crosses this nation.
Not to mention the sheer size of the country and the difficulty in networking it. We want Japan 1Gig speed today and for less than a hundred dollars. Who is paying for this upgrade?
I worked extensively on the Verizon FIOS project during the planning stages and can tell you Verizon is losing their A** on the build out. It will be many years before they can recoop the cost.
Aehm, isn't Charter close to bankruptcy?
http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:CHTRter.JPG
Doesn't look good for them at all...
These prices are crazy for this. I pay 60$/month for 50mbs fiber. Utah utopia ftw!
I would NEVER pay $140 a month for internet service no matter how fast it is. Especially right now with this whole "depression" business.
I will never have to worry about it in my lifetime though, seeing as it has only been less than a year since we were able to finally get cable on my dirt road....
What good is all this "high speeds" when they're going to throttle you to death. It's like having the phone company telling me that "well, you can make phone calls. But, occasionally, you're going to hear static on certain words during your call because we think you're calling too much."
I'm happy with my 30mbps comcast line.
I have had Charter for about 2 years now and am on the 10/1 package. I live in Lodi, WI. About the only complaints I have are outages. When the service is working I always get my rated speed. I did install a drop amp to make sure all of my signal levels are where they need to be.
I wonder how many people that have bandwidth problems also have signal quality issues. I would be willing to bet a lot of them. Charter subcontracts a lot of their work. While this does not excuse poor performance, I think it does explain a lot of the customers problems. The subcontracted techs in my area do a very poor job. They will split the signal many times before a cable modem. Will tell a customer that snow in an anlog channel is normal and they should upgrade to digital.
If you are technically competant then Charter's service can be quite good. If you rely on them to do everything then you will have problems. Charter needs to imporve their customer service. I think the technical infrastructure is ok in a lot of places.
The best plus to them in my area is there are no bandwidth caps and no throttling.
I'm not surprised to see most of the posts be complaints concerning Charter; those with poor experience are usually the most vocal. I however, have no issues with Charter. I pay for their service, they give me service. Ok, there were 2-3 occurrences of outages during the 5 years I was (and am) with them, but I usually just wait around 2 days and everything was fixed. They never screwed me over with price, although I think they're overpriced. But overall they give me no troubles, so I have no complaints.
Who pays $140/mo for FiOS? I have Verizon FiOS internet and TV right now for under $100/mo and I'm getting a solid 20Mbps as well as all HD channels except HBO and Cinemax, and DVR service. I hope no one is paying that much for internet alone!
I'd imagine I've had worse Charter experiences than anybody. But... I've told the story so many times, it's not worth it. Now, I pretty much have free charter service for the rest of my life, for the BS that we dealt with. (a few emails to the CEO started to get things cleared up).
Charter billing is a joke. They give you this great offer and then charge you $40 more later on without even asking you. You can't get an actual price without their "$30/month for the first 12 months" garbage. What's worse is that after I switched to AT&T they come over to my house every month to sell me something.
Charter TV is pretty terrible too. I canceled it because of lack of many HD channels and no NBA League Pass. At least their Digital Receiver isn't slow and bloated like DirecTV's receiver.
In 3 years of service I never had any problems with my 10mb Charter Cable Internet Service. A few small problems, but when making a call to them it was a disaster. You have to spend 15 minutes talking to a robot to get a human being. I usually end up screaming into the phone.
I can rarely download at more than 600kb/sec, so what's the point of anything faster than 15m? The only time i'd ever get what I was paying for is when downloading binaries from a usenet service. Most FTP /HTTP servers don't let you download superfast anyway. Pay sites put a limit on download speeds usually anyway. I imagine Itunes and other sites do this too.
I downgraded from Charter service to AT&T 6mb DSL service. It's dirt cheap and it saves me about $25/month vs Charter. Unfortunatley I only get a 5m connection, but for $30/month, who can complain? They don't have a guarantee sadly. Max speed is about 650kb/sec on usenet.
Wait, how fast is FiOS then? I never even heard how fast that runs, and 140 a month, wow, I wonder how much my comcast is running at, I think its at 1.5Mbps right. I dont even fucking kno now, I dont pay for it. But this is only 7.5MB per second. And if they put a limit on this, jeeze it would be a rip off, i mean come on i got torrents to download and if people would seed i would be sitting great :-)
Working for Charter, let me just say this. It's the cheap labor that is the biggest problem of this company. Everybody that works for the company despises the outsourced reps and subcontractors because of their incompetence. They're way underpaid and really just don't give a damn it seems. I'm in a repair call center and you wouldn't believe how much garbage Charter employees have to clean up after these retards. I can almost bet if you call in and get somebody that works for the company, you will usually have an excellent experience. I know I try my hardest to make that little bit of a difference with everybody I speak with.
Service wise, the quality of the service depends on where you live. Charter bought up a lot of old cable systems that are in dire need of upgrades. Anyone always experiencing outages is probably in a area where a power supply unit or a node breaks down due to wear and tear or age.
Believe me when I say, Charter is SLOWLY but surely turning things around. And for those of you complaining about how much you pay? Most of the time all it takes is a simple call to our retention department to get you a better deal. Of all the cable/tv companies out there, I think Charter dishes out the best price if you can get the right discount. They are certainly way cheaper than the satellite companies and DSL providers here and you get more.
I have excellent service in the STL area and it's a HUGE improvement over my old DSL and DirecTV. Oh and BTW, Charter doesn't have just NINE HD channels... that rep had to be full of crap or this was either years ago when HD channels first started coming out. There are a ton HD selections and nothing beats a cable companies on demand service. (when it works).
To those who have had a poor Charter experience, I'm sorry you weren't able to talk to me. :P
I've worked for Verizon in Fios related jobs since 2005. We have the more then enough capability to double our upload and increase the upload speeds by six. It will require different routers in our CO's though. The reason we don't have Fios in more areas is because like someone said earlier, its expensive to lay fiber. It costs an average of $1200 to place Fios service at a residence, and people only pay a $29 install fee. If people get a triple play (voice, data, and video) that maybe will be paid back to Verizon by the end of one year. Verizon still doesn't even profit at that rate. In the area's we have fiber available we have a take-rate of less then 20%. So a lot of money is spent and only the people who know better order the service. Even though we are cheaper, better, and nicer then competing cable companies people are tricked by ads from Comcast and Time Warner that say crap like "We already have fiber optics serving ALL our customers"
Most people don't know that they are talking about their fiber that is miles away from their homes. The same fiber that any communications company has used since the 80's. Fios is going to continue to get better because we invest in technology to make the service better, not ads to trick people into keeping our service.
with charters stock at 9cents right now ... i dont know what to say about the launch of this..
Yeah, charter basically sucks. i would need to get this 60mbps to even get close to what they advertise im supposed to get now. 10mbps my a** im lucky to hit higher that 800kbs down