Charter Ups Broadband Speeds Again, Bumps Top Tier to 100 Mbps –

DiGeronimo says DSL is Basically Archaic

Original Publication Date: 12/1/2011

Original News Source: Multichannel News

By Todd Spangler — Multichannel News, 12/1/2011 3:00:00 PM

Looking to kick more sand in the face of DSL, Charter Communications is increasing connection speeds of its three top broadband tiers — Express, Plus and Ultra, which will now provide downloads of up to 100 Megabits per second — at no additional cost for subscribers.

The speed boosts are the MSO’s fourth in the last three years. The faster speeds will take effect in markets with DOCSIS 3.0 technology deployed, which represents approximately 95% of Charter’s service area.

“As customers share multiple devices on a single connection, we want to send a very strong message: DSL is basically archaic,” said Rich DiGeronimo, Charter’s senior vice president of product and strategy.

Charter is increasing Internet Express downstream speeds from 12 Mbps to up to 15 Mbps, and increasing upstream speeds from 1 Mbps to up to 3 Mbps. Internet Plus downstream speeds are being increased from 18 Mbps to up to 30 Mbps, and upstream speeds are being increased from 2 Mbps to up to 4 Mbps.

In addition, Charter’s fastest residential offering is increasing from 60 Mbps to 100 Mbps — with Ultra100 providing 100 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream. Charter’s Internet Lite tier will remain 3 Mbps down.

The midlevel Plus tier, at 30/4, is now faster than the fastest AT&T U-verse Internet service available. Charter’s footprint overlap with AT&T is 60%, although U-verse is not available in all of those areas.

“We believe we have an advantage in this space,” DiGeronimo said. “The thirst for speed is only growing.”

Charter is offering Express for $19.99 per month for 12 months to new customers, Plus for $29.99 per month. Ultra100 is $40 more per month than the Express tier.

“We’re not asking for more money. It’s really about differentiation,” DiGeronimo said. About 90% of Charter’s broadband customers take either Express and Plus service.

Charter’s broadband services are subject to different usage thresholds. Customers with Lite and Express tiers are allotted at 100 Gigabytes of bandwidth usage per month, while those on the Plus and Max services have a threshold of 250 GB per month. The Ultra100 tier will be capped at 500 GB per month; previously, the Ultra60 tier did not have a maximum usage limit. Charter currently does not charge overage fees for those who exceed the thresholds; however, users’ accounts may be suspended for repeated violations.

Charter also is increasing speeds for business customers, bumping up commercial Internet speeds at no cost for two of its most popular services, Charter Business Internet Essentials16 and 25. The speed increase will take place in approximately 95% of Charter’s service areas nationwide.

Specifically, the speed increases are: Internet Essetials16, with download speeds of 16 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 2 Mbps, will increase to up to 20 Mbps download and up to 3 Mbps upload; and Internet Essentials25, with download speeds of 25 Mbps and upload speeds of 3 Mbps, will increase to up to 30 Mbps download and up to 4 Mbps upload — which the MSO notes is at least 6 times faster than 5 Mbps DSL service and 20 times faster than T1 lines. Charter’s fastest commercial offerings, Pro50 and Pro100, remain the same, providing up to 50 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload and up to 100 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload, respectively.

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Homeland Secure IT loves Charter! We help Greenville & Upstate South Carolina individuals & businesses get connected with high speed internet all the time and Charter, especially Charter Business, has the highest customer satisfaction of any of the ISPs we work with. If you are feeling the need for speed, email us at info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748 and we can assist you in the search for the best service and the best price!

The Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is shipping on the 17th of June, and pre-orders are being accepted at major retailers now, so dads, be sure to let your family know!

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 comes in two flavors, a $499.99 version which sports 16GB and a $599.99 version which has 32GB.

Anyone want to buy a slightly used, and personalized Apple iPad 2 64GB w/Verizon 3G?  I would gladly let it go for slightly less than I have in it in order to get the Android Honeycomb 3.1 operating system, Adobe Flash, dual core processor, yada yada yada…  But alas, Verizon has not released their 4G LTE version yet. When that happens, you may be seeing me dump an iPad 2 for just enough to replace it with the Tab 10.1!

If you plan on getting one, or maybe plan on NOT getting one, I’d love to hear what you have to say…

If you have one of these phones, you can associate it with your smartphone via Bluetooth and then do the following:

• Make a call from your smartphone’s number, using your Cisco phone
• Answer your incoming smartphone’s incoming calls from the Cisco phone
• Download the contacts from your smartphone to the Cisco phone
• See the signal strength and battery charge of your smartphone on the Cisco display
• Charge your smartphone using the USB port

Want more information about the Cisco SPA series of business VoIP phones? Email info@homelandsecureit.com or call 864.990.4748. We are your Cisco Small Business Select Partners in Greenville & Upstate, SC!

You don’t have to sit back and wait for your ISP to provide you with IPv6, you can play with IPv6 today using a “Tunnel Broker”.

How does that work? Hurricane Electric is one example of a tunnel broker who allows you to use IPv6 via tunneling through the traditional IPv4 network from an IPv6 configured host or router to one of the Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel routers.

What do you need? A IPv6 capable router/firewall or IPv6 capable host. That’s it.

What if your router doesn’t support IPv6? It may be flashable to run one of the Open Source offerings such as OpenWRT or DD-WRT , or you could invest less than 100 dollars and purchase a compatible device.

You’ve got the hardware, now what? Go to the Hurricane Electric site or another Tunnel Broker, create your tunnel and you should be able to get it going in a short period of time.

Next point some hosts from your domain to your new IPv6 IPs and give it a try!  Now you’re ready for World IPv6 day!

While this is fun and gives you an opportunity to work with the “new” technology, I would not recommend this as your long term solution, nor would I recommend it for a corporate or even business network solution.

If you have a Greenville / Upstate business that you need to prepare for an IPv6 deployment, please contact us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com – We can help pave the way to a smooth transition.

Windows MultiPoint Server 2011

Microsoft is planning a March release for it’s Windows MultiPoint Server 2011.

Some nifty features are included in this version, such as the ability for a teacher / instructor to view student desktops as thumbnails and to interact with those sessions. Use of thin clients over LAN allows for virtually unlimited distances between stations, connect multiple MultiPoint Servers and manage from MultiPoint Manager console, split screen ability at each user stations allows for use of each station by two people (collaboration and sharing), Active Directory connectivity to your existing domain, and more!

And of course for those of you who purchased MultiPoint Server 2010 with Software Assurance (SA), you can upgrade with no additional charge!

Want to know more about MultiPoint Server 2011? Microsoft has information available HERE.

Some great videos are available on the TechNet SBS blog, one of which follows:

From the looks of it, Windows MultiPoint is growing up and stands to make a real impact in classrooms!

If you would like additional information about the forthcoming releases of Microsoft MultiPoint 2011 Server or Microsoft Small Business Server 2011, please call us at 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com. We are a Microsoft Small Business Specialist partner and can help your Greenville / Upstate business determine what is right for you!

These predictions are based upon industry news, social media and blog rambling as well as some personal wishes.

Will any of it come to fruition? I guess at the end of 2011 you can remind me how wrong I was.

A few IT Predictions for 2011:

• Google Android based devices will continue to dominate the market in smartphones, pads, and everything else from alarm clocks and personal weather stations to set top boxes.

• Wireless carriers will discover that loading their own “value added” bundled software on top of the phones they sell is really a turn off and that keeping the smartphone just as the manufacturer and OS provider intended it to be will enable a faster rollout of updates and make for happier customers.

• Dish, DirecTV & cable TV providers have a fight on their hands… Services like Netflix and a whole slew of streaming providers will fight to bring first run movies, and streaming of networks via the internet. We will see many new set top boxes, TVs with built-in streaming capability. The most exciting thing will be an the legal battles around this, not really the technology itself.

• Tablet and pad wars will continue. Apple’s iPad II will provide some stiff competition for the Android pads, but be prepared for Android based pads to spring up everywhere as more are cleared for import to the USA.

• Internet Tax? Yep, 2011 is the year. So much revenue is being lost that I predict we will see taxes placed on our online purchases. I believe it will be both good and bad. Some online retailers may no longer be able to beat out the local brick and mortar prices, so that could be good for us smaller guys, but it may slow down the injection of money into the economy. Either way, it’s coming.

• Cloud Computing: Over half of all businesses will look into using cloud based services, whether it is online storage, online backup, online applications like Microsoft BPOS or Google Apps, hosted anti-virus, hosted anti-spam or even hosted VoIP solutions. Of these, 10% will actually make the switch, and half who do make the switch will be totally happy, with the other dissatisfied due to bandwidth or network reliabilty. The number of fully satisfied people will go up as the technology matures.

• Malicious software will affect more Macs and Linux based machines in 2011. We’ve already seen a sharp increase in the number of exploited machines, expect this trend to continue. Add to this smartphones as a target.

• Network Connectivity: Charter Business has just come out with a 75×5 meg Pro75 package. This is great, but I expect this to reach 100×10 by the end of 2011, possibly as a free upgrade like they upgraded the 20meg to 30meg…

What do you think the very near future has in store for us? More solid state storage devices? Hard Drives reaching 5TB?

Either way, we hope you have a very Happy New Year!

This sure isn't DSL!

Tired of waiting for that ISO to download? I know the feeling, even with the 30megabit download speeds we currently have…

As if they were reading our minds regarding speed limitations, our Charter Business rep let us know the other day that they have turned it up a notch here in Greenville and are offering two new speed packages.

The “Pro40″ package is 40 megabit down and 4 megabit up… YIKES!  40m x 4m is incredible! 4 megabit up is nearly twice what we have now and an extra 10 megabit down will make those big ISOs arrive a bit quicker. Oh but that’s nothing at all. Seriously.

There’s a “Pro75″ package, yeah, and you already guessed it: 75 megabit down and 5 megabit up. Holy #&!% this is amazing!!!!!!!   All I want for Christmas is 75×5.

While it is not Google Fiber, it is available right now, without a huge outlay of cash. In fact, the 75×5 is less than the cost of a 1.5m up/down T1.

This type of bandwidth is necessary if you are contemplating a move towards cloud computing, and the uplink speeds will allow you to better serve remote users!

If you would like more information about Charter Business services and how it can help your business, please give us or your Charter Business rep a call. Our free network support evaluation will tell you if your current firewall, router, switch, etc may be a bottleneck in your new high-speed network infrastructure.  We are also your Upstate experts on cutovers from one internet service provider to another. Call us today – 864.990.4748 or email info@homelandsecureit.com

I was at their door at 9 AM to find the nice little tech all apologetic over the fact that the update bombed during the night and that she had started it over….   I figured 45 minutes, maybe an hour…   So I waited… And waited.

Turns out the operating system had become corrupt and the trusty old BB was now a brick…  She said a phone could be in tomorrow but it looked like Monday. (This was at about 11:30 or so)

If you know me, you know that I am one connected guy, constantly getting and sending emails, direct connects, phone calls, twitter, facebook, foursquare, yada yada yada, and being without my phone for 18+ hours was making me more than antsy! The tech was going to put my SIM card, keyboard and whatever in another old/broken phone and let me use that. But then the phone would be just a phone, until it was put back on our Blackberry Enterprise Server, only to repeat this again when the replacement phone came in.

At this point, I called my wife and we went for option two. We purchased new Samsung Epic 4g Android 2.2 phones, and swung our service over from the Nextel side to the Sprint side. Then worked on getting all the phones going for the techs and myself. I left there at about 2:15 in the afternoon, with a phone in my hand for the first time in almost 24hrs.

Now we are getting these new phones setup and tweaked to suit our needs…  They are associated with our Microsoft Exchange Server (I have two Exchange servers and a Google account associated with mine), and using the app that Bradley Durham told us about, TiKL, we now have a replacement for Nextel’s “Direct Connect”, though kinda sketchy…

The specs for the Samsung Epic 4g are quite amazing…

• Android 2.2 OS
• 1Ghz Samsung
• 4″ AMOLED
• 5 Megapixel camera 720p
• 16 GB memory card
• 3g / 4g speeds (Up to 10 Mbps at 4g which is not in Greenville yet)
• WiFi Hotspot for up to 5 devices
• QWERTY Keyboard that slides out
• Claims of 6+ hours talk time

Only time will tell, and I will post a follow-up to this post as we get used to these phones…..     As for me, I am back to finding the perfect app for Twitter, Facebook, etc, etc, etc….

If you want to read my original post, go HERE

Have a great weekend!!!

You can view your trends with a web interface, and access the data with your iPhone. I believe something like this really could encourage you to lose some weight. Recently there have been news stories which cite studies about weight loss and the results indicate that those who use internet weight tracking actually do lose more weight and manage to maintain that loss better than those who do not.

The thing that bothers me is that it will Tweet out your weight once a week to Twitter. All I could think was exactly what it would be tweeting when I stepped on it… Something like, “HELP ME! This fat guy is smushing me!” is probably what it would have to say about me! Still, it is an interesting gadget and I would love to have it. Who knows, maybe I will order one. Follow me on Twitter to see what this thing has to say!

The FCC wants you to signup to shape the future of broadband in America

The FCC is looking for about 10,000 good men and women to help test their broadband connections in certain markets and from certain providers by installing a piece of equipment to meter the throughput at their home.

If you are interested in participating, you can go to https://www.testmyisp.com/ and fill out the application. You must meet certain requirements, such as having a high speed / broadband connection like cable or DSL from prividers such as Charter, AT&T, Cable One, Cablevision, CenturyLink, Cincinnati Bell, Clearwire, Comcast, Cox,  Fairpoint, Frontier, Hughes, Insight, Mediacom, Qwest, RCN, Time Warner Cable (Roadrunner), Verizon, WildBlue/ViaSat, Windstream, or “other”, which will allow you to write in your broadband provider.

Apparently, they will place a simple device onto your LAN, and you must agree to the terms of usage, such as leaving it on 24/7, not trying to reverse engineer the device, etc.

Conspiracy theories are already out there that this device will be doing more than watching your throughput, such as watching your browsing habits. Possible, but unlikely. The company that has partnered with the FCC would probably not want to get that kind of bad press if this were found to be true.

I signed up our home and will let you know if we are selected…