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When AT&T’s U-verse system arrived in Lawrence, Kansas residents rejoiced at the prospect of finally getting broadband service that didn’t come with Internet Overcharging schemes attached. Sunflower Broadband, the local independent cable system, tied its fortunes to broadband usage allowances as low as three gigabytes per month. Exceeding the allowance kicked in an overlimit fee for every extra gigabyte used.
As AT&T continues to make inroads in Lawrence with U-verse, which doesn’t have usage limits, customers noticed and began dropping Sunflower. The cable system also noticed, and has increased plan allowances.
On the low end, the Bronze plan still charges $17.95 per month for 3Mbps/256kbps service with a three gigabyte allowance . The Silver plan — $29.95 per month — received a speed and allowance upgrade. Up from 7Mbps to 10Mbps, the monthly limit has now doubled to 50 GB per month. Upload speeds remain an anemic 256kbps, however. The biggest change comes for Gold plan users. For $59.95 per month, the company offers 50/1Mbps service with a considerably more generous allowance — 250GB per month, up from 120GB.
Sunflower Broadband's Old Pricing/Service Plan (from January 2010)
Sunflower also sells a flat rate, unlimited plan called Palladium that doesn’t offer customers a set speed. The company cut the price from $49.95 to $44.95 a month, perhaps in response to an underwhelmed customer base. As we reported in January, Palladium speeds do not impress many Sunflower customers. But some local residents report speeds are improving for those moved to Sunflower’s new DOCSIS 3 platform, an upgrade from Sunflower’s older system, where most of the speed complaints were noted.
The Lawrence Broadband Observer says AT&T and Sunflower are becoming close competitors in most respects, except upload speeds:
The one area where Sunflower still lags is upload speed, which even on the high-end plan is still limited to 1 megabit. This seems puzzling, and the 50 down to 1 up ratio of is greater then any other DOCSIS 3 cable company I was able to find, and makes it difficult to use services like photo and movie uploading, file sharing and online backup services. If Sunflower ever raises their upload speeds, they might just be able to lure this former customer back into the fold!
They could lure many more back if they dropped the hated usage limits and overlimit fees. DOCSIS 3 provides substantially improved bandwidth, making such limits unnecessary.
Sunflower's New Broadband Plans & Pricing (February 2010)
The upload speed Sunflower offers is terrible. Look at that 50Mbps package! That upload would completely saturate if you pegged the download at full speed. If Sunflower wants to compete with UVerse they’ll need to ditch the caps and also boost those upload speeds a lot. The speeds they have are speeds that a DOCSIS 1.0/2.0 system can handle just fine for upstream. Their 50Mbps package needs to show upstream speeds that actually show a DOCSIS 3.0 system, meaning 5+Mbps upstream.
Sunflower’s always been stingy with upload speeds. Even now they are at 1 MB on the high end plan, and only 256k on the two other plans. Compare this to competitors like Comcast and Cox which have offered DOCSIS2 upload speeds of greater then 1 MB on even low end plans for years.
For what it’s worth, 50 Mbps down will NOT saturate 1 Mbps up. Might take out half of it though, depending on packet size. I could do all the calculations if anyone wanted them, but anyhow… Also, I’m guessing that SFBB has only one upstream channel on their system, and the plant is in lousy condition so they’re modulating the return path at a crappy QPSK, so only 3.6 Mbps of capacity per channel. TWC runs their upsteams at 16QAM from what I hear, and that’s why their D3 package tops out at 5 Mbps up. Comcast uses 64QAM for… Read more »