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Charlotte, N.C. Time Warner Cable customers can thank city officials in nearby Salisbury for finally provoking Time Warner Cable into boosting speeds for residents across the region. Just as community-owned Fibrant was opening its doors for business promoting its new fiber to the home service, the area’s dominant cable company managed to steal some of their thunder.
Time Warner Cable this week announced the entire Charlotte service region, which encompasses Salisbury, is getting a free broadband speed upgrade this week.
“We substantially increased our download speeds and essentially doubled upload speeds for all of our Turbo and Standard Internet service customers,” said Mike Smith, area vice president for Time Warner Cable’s Charlotte operation.
| Product Name | New Speed | Old Speed |
| Turbo Internet | 15/1Mbps | 10Mbps/512kbps |
| Standard Internet | 10/1Mbps | 7Mbps/384kbps |
The announcement allows Time Warner Cable to maintain its position as the fastest downstream Internet provider in the Charlotte region because Fibrant’s marketing department decided that 25Mbps service was fast enough. No, it’s not, and Time Warner Cable showed them up.
Salisbury is located northeast of the city of Charlotte, N.C.
“This service upgrade demonstrates our commitment to deliver enhanced value to our customers. We are satisfying their thirst for more throttle,” said Smith. To access the new speeds, customers need to reboot their cable modem which is easily accomplished by leaving it unplugged for about one minute.
The company is also introducing two speed tiers in Charlotte this week. Customers will have the option of purchasing or upgrading to DOCSIS 3 Wideband Internet or Road Runner Extreme service. Wideband Internet–the fastest residential Internet experience in Charlotte–provides customers with speeds up to 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream for $99.95 per month.
Road Runner Extreme delivers speeds up to 30 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream for as low as $64.95 per month when bundled with any other Time Warner Cable Service.
As Stop the Cap! has strongly advised all municipal providers — there is not much point in providing fiber to the home service if you are not willing to capitalize on its benefits. Offering a maximum speed of 25Mbps just is not going to cut it, as Time Warner Cable demonstrates.
Fibrant’s pricing models are also endangered by this week’s developments. Road Runner Extreme delivers 30Mbps downstream for $65 a month (admittedly a bundled price) while Fibrant offers 25Mbps service for the same price (standalone service). Fibrant still kills Time Warner on upload speed, but that’s a distinction that could be lost among many potential customers, and is easily solved by boosting download speeds as well.
Fibrant must immediately consider speed upgrades for their existing tiers to assure its value proposition and launch a new super-premium speed tier that can show off fiber to the home’s true capacity to deliver the best possible Internet speeds in the region.
It’s amazing what happens when there is true competition. Get a competitor in that won’t follow cable’s longstanding, unspoken agreement to not invade each others turf, and all of a sudden service improves and consumers get more value for their money.
I am rooting for Fibrant to hand out some free speed upgrades of their own. There is no reason a fiber network cannot always be the speed leader in a community.
Yep in my area of Charlotte I already got the 10/1 and was really shocked when I saw it
Rooting for Fibrant on this one, but they’ve gotta up speeds a bit. Moving their 25/25 tier to 35/35 should do the trick there, and pushing 15/15 to 20/20 should sweeten the pot as well. No price breaks needed, just a bit of a speed increase, which their infrastructure should be able to easily support.
btw anyone know what backbone Fibrant is using? I could figure out if someone gave me their Fibrant IP address…
Level 3
What is the speed of the Level 3 service they use? I’ve heard only 300Mbps. How are they going to offer 200Mbps service with that? Time warner had an OC48 and multiple OC12’s in 2005. It’s hard to tell what they have now.
Wow who would of thunk that competition works?
Fibrant needs to really blow away Time Warner here. They should beat Time Warners top tier 50/5 plan and all the other tiers also by a considerable margin if you ask me. That and they need to tweak those prices a little.
The speed bump happened back in October, ya’ll.
All of these speeds are slow.