Charter Getting Ready To Roll Out 60 Mbps Base Internet Service!
In the St. Louis area, Charter this month announced plans to move all its customers to digital service. Charter says that the Missouri and Southern Illinois all-digital upgrade is scheduled to begin in mid-January and run through mid-summer, with groups of customers transitioning to an all-digital network on a rolling basis. The switch eliminates analog service, which is a good thing. A single analog channel takes as much capacity as 14 digital stations. So digital means that Charter can move much more data through its cable pipe. Charter says it will use that space to double the speed of its standard residential service to 60/4 Mbps from 30/4 Mbps later this year at no additional costs to customers. Charter also plans to add 79 HD TV channels, catching up to AT&Ts offerings on its U-verse service.
We heard online that many Charter residential and business internet customers can already get these new speeds after a quick modem reboot. We tried it out and can confirm that after we restarted our DOCSIS 3.0 cable model that we were getting the free speed upgrade. It appears that Charter has silently started to roll out the speed boosts, so if you are a Charter customer you might want to reboot your cable modem and see what happens. You can run the Charter endorsed Ookla Speed Test to check out your before and after speeds.
We are happy to see that Charter doubled the download speeds from 30 Mbps to 60 Mbps, but very dissapointed that they left the upload speeds at 4 Mbps. That is still painfully slow and a PITA for people uploading video content. It is sad that you can upload a YouTube video faster on your phones 4G LTE network than you can at home on a powerful computer with a 60/4 internet connection! Hopefully Charter will take note of this and their upload speed hits the double digits, especially with the Ultra 100 tier. AT&T says it plans to double its U-verse Internet speeds by the end of next year, which is currently 45 Mbps in most areas. Charter is trying to stay on top, but next year they’ll have to move to 100Mbps in order to do so for their base internet package.
Speeds from the next morning:
