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Fibrant Blows Past Time Warner Cable: 200/200Mbps Planned, 50/50 Already Available

Fibrant ruins Time Warner Cable's Speed Party by delivering faster service at a lower price, without the cable company's rate increase notice sitting in Charlotte-area mailboxes.

Residents of Salisbury, N.C. are going to get some of the state’s fastest broadband speeds as the community-owned broadband provider prepares to introduce 200/200Mbps service, leaving Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner service behind in the dust.

Time Warner Cable enjoyed a few moments in the spotlight last week announcing free speed upgrades for the Charlotte region, which includes Salisbury.  But Fibrant’s fiber to the home network is well-equipped to turn Time Warner’s temporary speed advantage on its head.

Last week, the cable operator promoted the introduction of its new maximum speed 50/5Mbps Road Runner Wideband service, which carries a monthly price of $99.95.

But Salisbury city officials were unimpressed, claiming Fibrant already offers 50/50Mbps service — they just haven’t advertised it.

Assistant City Manager Doug Paris said Fibrant’s top available speed is 10 times faster than the cable giant’s when uploading.

“We’re cheaper, and we’re faster,” Paris told the Salisbury Post.  Fibrant sells the 50Mbps service for $85 a month, about 15 dollars less than Time Warner Cable’s slower Wideband service.

City officials also weren’t surprised that Time Warner announced faster Internet speeds the day after Fibrant launched.

“We’ve seen this in every other city that has invested in fiber optics,” he said. “They are trying to match our speeds, but they can’t.”

The Salisbury Post needs a few cans for its message boards, filled with anonymous lunacy.

Time Warner Cable claimed its new speeds were not in response to Fibrant but were part of a service upgrade for the entire Charlotte area, a claim every cable company makes in response to new competition on their doorstep.

Fibrant’s upstream streams are dramatically better than those offered by Time Warner Cable, which uses an inferior network architecture not currently capable of delivering the same upstream and downstream speeds to consumers.  Cable broadband networks are constructed with the assumption most users will download far more than they upload, so the networks emphasize downstream speeds.  Time Warner Cable has dramatically increased those download speeds, but has been forced so far to limit uploads to just 5Mbps.

Fiber to the home networks like Fibrant do not suffer those limitations, and the city plans to exploit that in their marketing.

Fibrant has the capacity to provide up to 1 gigabit per second upload and download, Paris said. Forthcoming are plans offering 100/100 and 200/200Mbps service, with prices yet to be determined.

Fibrant continues to have a waiting list of several hundred area residents waiting for service, but you wouldn’t know it from the raucous anonymous postings on the Post’s website.  Virtually all of the anonymous comments about Fibrant have been negative and wildly uninformed, to the point of hilarity.  From a Korean War veteran talking about eating blueberries and living life in the Windstream DSL slow lane (and loving it) to comments proclaiming fiber optics as woefully slower than WiMax, the Internet trolls have managed to prove why an increasing number of newspapers have learned to adopt “real names-only” posting policies or have just turned the comment section off altogether.

For those fans of  Time Warner Cable, the price of that love is about to go up.

Time Warner is mailing notices to Charlotte area customers announcing broadband rate hikes for some customers this December.  Time Warner customers who bundle their services or are on price protection promotions will be exempted from the rate increases… for now.

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anonymous
anonymous
13 years ago

OOO speed war!

speedster
speedster
13 years ago

Competition is a wonderful thing.
Too bad Rochester NY does not offer an alternative like this.
Time Warner treats uncompetitive markets badly.

jr
jr
13 years ago

“Be happy with your 12 year old modem”-Time Warner

Christopher Mitchell
13 years ago

Well, Phillip, congratulations, you correctly called another one.

Tim
Tim
13 years ago

Wow, now I really do wish I lived in Salisbury.

Ian L
13 years ago

Fnny how Salisbury a week or two ago said they couldn’t afford to do much/any better than they were doing at the time. I’m guessing that was on the TV side though…when they saw that people tend not to use their internet pipes a ton they realized they could ratchet up speeds on premium tiers and make more money doing it. Which is fine with me. Here’s hoping they start advertising the crap out of the $85 50 Mbps tier, coparing it to TWC’s 50/5 lameness. Naturally, TWC will lower the price of 50M with some introductory deal, but I’d… Read more »

Tim
Tim
13 years ago

“Fibrant continues to have a waiting list of several hundred area residents waiting for service, but you wouldn’t know it from the raucous anonymous postings on the Post’s website. Virtually all of the anonymous comments about Fibrant have been negative and wildly uninformed, to the point of hilarity.” I went to the article and sure enough most people posting responses sounded like industry shills. “Ohh Fibrant sucks, Time Warner rulz!!”, was pretty much the gist of it. Funny, Time Warner miraculously gave Salisbury DOCSIS 3, Salisbury being a small town, when other larger areas serviced by Time Warner have yet… Read more »

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