[Madlug] Experience with Charter?

[Brian Kroth]

Brad Stone <brad at bizwerks.com> 2009-05-06 11:34:
> My experience with Charter has been pretty good. We have a 10Mb/1Mb
> connection and it rarely goes down. Most bandwidth tests show the speed
> usually ranges in the 7.5 to 10Mb range depending on when they are
> performed.

I'm on the East side with a similar setup, though I've never seen the
speeds drop below 9Mb/800Kb.  Overall I can't complain too much.  The
service has been fine for what I needed from it.  I wish it were
cheaper, but when I last looked at things it was still the cheapest
around for the speeds.  In fact until somebody else's post I didn't
think anyone else around had anything close to the 10M/1M range.  The
fact that there were no contracts was another plus.

> Two things that you should consider when looking at Charter:
> 
> 1) Charter is in bankruptcy. There will probably be changes in the next
> year or so as they either get acquired or alter their service policies
> to make themselves more profitable.
> 
> 2) Charter recently implemented bandwidth caps. Any connection under
> 15Mb is limited to 100GB/month. I think the 20GB plan has either a 200GB
> or 250GB limit.

Some quick calculations will show that it wouldn't take long to reach
that limit on a 10M connection.  However, I've been told that so long as
you're not obviously outrageous this isn't enforced.  It's likely that
they have a hard time even tracking it.  I think the intention was
simply to try and get people to use their cable tv services for video
rather than their internet services.  My understanding is that their big
problem customers are in the high student density areas since with cable
you are affected by your neighbors more so they need to spend more on
network upkeep.

A couple of months ago they announced that they were gonna start
injecting ads into browsing and people were so upset by this that
eventually the Senate said they'd like to investigate things first and
then the whole thing got dropped. A similar thing happened with Time
Warner recently trying to move to a cell phone like payment plan for
internet services.  I'm hopeful that something similar will happen with
this.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9986423-38.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10221470-94.html

Brian