Charter Ups Broadband Speeds To Leave DSL Further In The Dust
MSO Boosts Downstream Speeds for Express, Plus Tiers for No Additional Charge
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 1/31/2011 7:00:00 AM
Charter Communications is increasing download speeds of its two primary broadband tiers, Express and Plus, at no additional cost for subscribers for the second time in less than a year.
On Monday, the St. Louis-based operator will boost Internet Express -- its most popular broadband tier -- from up to 8 Megabits per second to up to 12 Mbps downstream. The Internet Plus tier will increase from up to 16 Mbps to up to 18 Mbps down.
The free upgrades come after a previous increase in March 2010, when Charter took Express from 5 to 8 Mbps and Plus from 10 to 16 Mbps downstream.
"We looked at it this year and decided that this was now a good time to really separate from DSL," Charter vice president of Internet and phone product management Carl Leuschner said. "We think in the future DSL will have a harder time delivering this experience."
Charter Business customers will also experience a free increase in Internet speeds: Pro40Mbps increases to Pro50Mbps and Pro75Mbps service advances to Pro100Mbps.
Upload speeds, however, will remain unchanged: up to 1 Mbps for Express and up to 2 Mbps for Plus. Also staying the same are Charter's Max and Ultra60 services, with download speeds up to 25 Mbps and 60 Mbps.
"Right now we haven't gotten feedback from customers asking for [higher upload speeds]," Leuschner said.
Another reason Charter decided to boost speeds for those two tiers was to serve customers who are connecting more devices to their home networks. "In the old days people were focused on which single application in the home was using the most bandwidth, but now we estimate there are around six IP devices in a home," Leuschner said.
Meanwhile, Charter's market overlap with Verizon's FiOS Internet is only about 7%, according to Leuschner.
Charter's DOCSIS 3.0 rollout is independent of the speed increases on the Express and Plus tiers. At the end of 2010 the operator had deployed 3.0 to 55% of its footprint and will have the technology virtually fully deployed by the end of this year with the exception of a few pockets, Leuschner said.
Last week, Netflix issued rankings of 16 U.S. Internet service providers that showed Charter delivered the highest average throughput for HD streaming video over a three-and-a-half month period.
"It's a good-news story for Charter," Leuschner said. "What that data says to us is, the investment we've made in the network to deliver best experience for customers is paying off."
Charter's monthly usage caps remain unchanged: 100 Gigabytes for Lite and Express tiers; 250 GBytes for Plus and Max services; and 500 GBytes for Ultra60. The MSO has no plans right now to bill based on consumption, Leuschner added.
The bulk of Charter's residential broadband customers -- 73% -- are on the Express tier, Leuschner said. When bundled with cable TV, Charter's Express tier is $29.99 per month for 12 months and Plus is $39.99 per month for 12 months.
St. Louis-based Charter had 3.2 million broadband customers and 4.7 million basic video subscribers as of Sept. 30, 2010.
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