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The Triangle -- North Carolina
Just a few days after Gov. Bev Purdue declined to veto an anti-consumer, anti-community broadband bill sponsored by Time Warner Cable, the cable company announced the imminent availability of its Road Runner Extreme and Wideband products — made possible with an upgrade to DOCSIS 3 technology.
The newly available service is officially being rolled out across the Triangle, including the cities of Raleigh-Durham and Chapel Hill over the next several weeks.
“We are empowering our customers with pure online power to save time and boost productivity when multitasking with multiple devices,” said Christine Whitaker, area vice president of operations for Eastern North Carolina. “As customers expand their use of the Internet, our services are evolving to meet their needs.”
Time Warner noted it had spent $8.5 million to upgrade the region to DOCSIS 3 service, and has already rolled out the upgrade in the Charlotte area. In the Triangle, the company also announced free speed upgrades for existing customers that took effect last week:
- Road Runner Turbo with PowerBoost 15 Mbps/1Mbps
- Road Runner Broadband with PowerBoost 10 Mbps/1 Mbps
North and South Carolina Time Warner Cable customers are among the last to get the speed upgrades Time Warner has completed in many of their service areas. Some customers formerly received upstream speeds of 512kbps or less. The cable company said recent fiber upgrades made the faster speeds possible, but DOCSIS 3 upgrades are responsible for allowing the cable company to offer its Extreme (30/5) and Wideband (50/5Mbps) products.
Despite the upgrades, Time Warner Cable still offers slower broadband service than many of its community-owned competitors, and the cable operator has made investments in broadband upgrades across most of its cable systems nationwide as a matter of course.
You should add “except South Carolina” to your last sentence. Here, the “lightening fast,” “turbo-charged” internet offered by the TWCopoly is an astounding 512kpbs on the upload. Standard Road Runner upload, empowered by TWC’s own “fiber-rich” network, a staggering 384kbps.
And we wonder why the United States is 12th globally? (South Carolina is ~41st nationally.)
You guys are slated for upgrades to 10/1 and 15/1 service before summer is out last time I checked.
I agree South Carolina is pretty much at the bottom of the priority heap for TWC, along with a handful of largely ignored cable systems they bought in the mid-south that are stapled onto Time Warner’s Carolinas regional office.
The only real bounty of fiber you guys are likely to encounter is in your breakfast cereal bowel.
Looks like Avila the Hun’s district is the one upgraded…surprise surprise
10/1 and 15/1 is CRAP! I live in SC. Give us a break! This is a disgrace. Charter and comcast are blowing us out of the water. What a disappointment….. 1MB up is what everyone else is probably upgrading FROM.
@ John. Well at least they recently announced it for you, I live in Nebraska and we’re stuck with 10/1 or 15/1 now and there is very little difference between those two and D3 is coming “soon” which means probably 6 months or more. Oh and the only other wired choice I have is 1.5/896 or 7mbps/896 Qwest dsl and after having 1mbps up for two years and I can say that it is too little upload, even Cox cable has higher uploads using D1.1/2 than TWC does.
Ian,
I agree with the fact that at least they are going to give us 1MB up. I feel like I’ve been ripped off for years. They have state of the art television stuff for all of the SC couch potatoes, and the worst internet service for everyone else.
Well John. Time Warner “Cable” is a Cable Company mostly, which is probably one of the reasons they have all these useless features in their tv system, which don’t even seem to work correctly on the old systems.(my experience) In the internet department their highest Docsis 3 tier(if available) is 50/5mbps which is the slowest highest D3 tier out of any cable systems in the US, I believe. I can’t doubt Time Warner Cable seems to invest the least amount of money into their internet. But if they got some real competition in most of their service areas, TWC would… Read more »
I think we need a market disruptor like Google to blow the lid off the duopoly. Could you imagine what Google Fiber or other players like Sonic would do if they focused on fiber broadband for a generation that increasingly considers cable television packages irrelevant? The current players all hope their TV packages are what binds customers to them, but they ignore the fact there are 20-somethings that have gone back to over the air stations and use Netflix and other on-demand video for EVERYTHING else they watch. They don’t care about the wired phone service either. AT&T and Verizon… Read more »