Charter Communications

Charter Communications is mostly a cable and broadband utility in the everyday sense: the company people call for internet, TV and phone service where it operates under the Spectrum brand. By our assessment, its real advantage is scale, because it can bundle home internet, video and mobile in one account and serve a huge residential market. The honest limit is that cable internet feels like cable internet: performance and customer satisfaction depend heavily on the local network, the building, and the usual tangle of contracts and equipment. In practice this is a service of installers, modems, set-top boxes and monthly bills, not a sleek digital product. It sits among the biggest US telecom and cable groups, and it is more about coverage and packaging than charm. Charter Communications is not trying to be elegant, just present in a lot of places.