In April 2016, Charter Communications completed the purchase of Time Warner, making the combined company the 2nd largest cable provider in the U.S. (with more than 29 million subscribers and just behind Comcast). This new entity will eventually be fully re-branded as Spectrum (that process is already underway as they're co-branding the websites of all their acquired companies and have launched a major PR campaign educating the public of the recent moves). And while we've already conducted a pre-TWC Charter comparison, services and deals under the new Spectrum TV and internet brand are still in flux and will likely continue to evolve as time goes by. We'll be posting those changes and rankings vs satellite on this page.
Since that acquisition - which, first, had to given the green light by the FCC to make sure antitrust, anti-monopoly regulations weren't in play - previous Time Warner subscribers saw a fairly smooth transition to Spectrum. Their services and bills didn't change much and they weren't forced to change or upgrade plans. Spectrum is still updating their systems to better integrate with TWC, so once that's fully completed, we may see a few more Spectrum-only plans roll out.
When we asked DirecTV what the average download and upload speeds are, the company said both are 1.5 Mbps, which is much slower than what most of the other internet service providers offer. Unfortunately, DirecTV won't give you an estimated connection speed until after you've purchased a TV plan with them. Download speed is the amount of time it takes to access websites and download Internet files to your computer. Upload speed is the time it takes to upload files, such as pictures and text files, to an Internet website.
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Around that same time-frame, Spectrum also picked up the east coast cable giant, Bright House Networks. A top 10 cable TV and internet company, the move expanded Spectrum's reach well into the Eastern seaboard states. Integration with Bright House's infrastructure seems to be going a bit quicker as subscribers are being encouraged to adopt Spectrum's plans and services (and for the most part, that move is for the better, price and technology-wise). Expect the Bright House brand to be completely dissolved sometime in 2017.