Alaska-based GCI has rolled out a free upgrade for customers in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Ketchikan, Mat-Su Valley, and Sitka that delivers broadband speeds up to 250/10Mbps.

GCI’s re:D broadband used to max out at 200Mbps, but thanks to channel bonding on the cable system, download speeds will be upgraded to 250Mbps in re:D service areas by the end of this year.

But getting 250Mbps broadband is not cheap in Alaska. The service is priced at $174.99 a month when part of a service bundle. Broadband-only customers also pay a $11.99 monthly access fee. Both come with 24-month contracts at that price. Customers who don’t want to be tied down can choose month-to-month service for $5 more per month.

At those prices, one might hope GCI would drop its usage cap, but customers can forget it. A 500GB monthly usage cap applies, with overlimit fees up to $30/GB on some plans.

GCI also announced it would deliver 1Gbps next year over a fiber to the home network under construction in Anchorage, promising “no limits with what you can do with broadband” without mentioning whether it planned usage limits for its fiber service as well.

GCI is asking customers to vote support for their neighborhoods getting fiber upgrades. The more red sections of this map of Anchorage shows, the more customers who have shown support for fiber broadband.

For most GCI customers, however, broadband will continue to arrive over the company’s HFC coaxial cable network. To better manage speeds, the company’s DOCSIS 3 platform is bonding eight cable channels, but in re:D areas the company bonds up to 24 cable channels, with plans to increase to 32 channels.

The speed increases come after its competitor Alaska Communications announced speed increases of its own. ACS sells unlimited access broadband service at speeds up to 50Mbps. ACS has beefed up its copper infrastructure to support faster Internet speeds, starting with 15Mbps introduced across the state in May. Now customers in Anchorage can subscribe to faster tiers including 30 and 50Mbps.

“Alaskans asked for faster Home Internet, and we’ve responded with these increased speeds, delivered with great customer service and without overage charges,” said ACS president and CEO Anand Vadapalli. “In addition to faster download speeds, customers choosing our product get the highest upload speeds that are so important for sharing videos and gaming.”

ACS has found its unlimited broadband offering attractive to customers who don’t want to worry about GCI’s overlimit fees. ACS also claims its customers get broadband over a dedicated line, not shared infrastructure like GCI, resulting in no speed slowdowns at peak usage times.

More people will read this story than Atlantic Broadband has current customers for its 1Gbps broadband project in Miami.

“Atlantic Broadband is proud to be the first company to deliver 1 Gigabit Internet service to its customers here in the Miami Beach area,” said David Keefe, Atlantic Broadband’s senior vice president and general manager of the South Florida region. “While other companies are talking about what they will be doing, Atlantic Broadband moved forward and started offering this service in one of its communities. We look forward to extending access to our Gigabit Internet service to other properties and communities within our Miami footprint.”

Although Mr. Keefe isn’t being modest, his company’s gigabit broadband coverage area certainly is.

At present, the company serves just 40 properties with the super high-speed broadband service in high-income Indian Creek Village — the 8th richest community in the United States.

The tiny village of Indian Creek, in the Miami-Dade area, is made up of 40 properties and is the 8th richest community in the U.S.A.

Designed to appeal to residents who can spare no expense, the Atlantic Broadband package also includes more than 350 TV channels powered by TiVo, integrated access to Netflix, and unlimited phone service for up to four lines.

An Atlantic Broadband spokesperson wouldn’t reveal the price of the package, and admitted customers cannot choose standalone broadband-only service.

“The needs of Indian Creek Village were unique so custom service packages were created that include all of Atlantic Broadband’s TV services, Gigabit Internet and four phone lines,” a spokeswoman told Multichannel News. “Currently, there is not a published a standalone price for Gigabit Internet.”

Residents in the wealthy enclave include Victoria’s Secret model Adriana Lima, Spanish singer Julio Iglesias, his son Enrique Iglesias, Robert Diener, co-founder of Hotels.com, Edward Lampert, hedge fund billionaire and owner of what is left of Kmart and Sears, Don Shula, retired football coach, Charles Bartlett Johnson, mutual fund billionaire, billionaire investor Carl Icahn and former Philadelphia Eagles owner and billionaire art collector Norman Braman.

Other famous residents both past and present have included Beyoncé and Jay-Z, pro golfer Raymond Floyd, coach Rick Pitino, U.S. Senator George Smathers, Sheik Mohammed al Fassi, television host Don Francisco, co-founder of Calvin Klein Barry Schwartz, radio magnate Raul Alarcon, coal and oil executive, heiress and philanthropist Suzie Linden, Arthur I. Appleton, President of Appleton Electric Company and founder of the Appleton Museum of Art and Bridlewood Farm, and his wife Martha O’Driscoll a former Hollywood actress.

Atlantic Broadband has not ripped out classic cable infrastructure for its less-well-to-do customers outside of the village in the Miami-Dade area and relies on RF over Glass technology for its network extensions. That allows the company to keep its legacy equipment in place while giving some residents access to fiber and others traditional coaxial cable.

Atlantic serves an island of customers in the Miami Beach area, but most of Miami gets its cable service from Comcast. Competitor AT&T has promised fiber upgrades and gigabit speeds for its own customers in the Hialeah, Hollywood, Homestead, Opa-Locka, and Pompano Beach areas, but no time frame has been announced for the upgrade.

Atlantic Broadband will have one advantage over AT&T U-verse. It does not have usage caps.

Atlantic Broadband serves around 230,000 residential and business subs in western Pennsylvania, Miami Beach, Maryland/Delaware, and Aiken, S.C. It is owned by Cogeco Cable of Canada.

du’s call center is 91% female and 100% staffed by citizens of the UAE. (Photo: The National)

Broadband users across the United Arab Emirates will soon find their Internet connections upgraded to 1Gbps as the country transforms its broadband services to deliver world-class speeds without steep price increases.

ISP du announced this month it had successfully completed tests to upgrade its network to deliver 1,000Mbps service to its customers, delivering a faster data experience over a substantially improved bandwidth backbone.

“Offering 1Gbps speeds is yet another incredible triumph of our team’s efforts and a significant milestone in our progression towards offering unmatched user experience,” said Saleem AlBalooshi, executive vice president of network development and operations at du. “As always, this is designed around our customers and they stand to benefit from this initiative.”

Customers in the United Arab Emirates already enjoy substantially better telecommunication service at a lower cost compared to North America.

UAE mobile users already receive VoLTE 4G service, which allows customers to talk and browse the Internet simultaneously on a substantially upgraded LTE network. The ISP has offered wireless customers HD Voice — a better quality voice calling experience — at no extra charge since 2012. The company has also extended the technology to its older 3G mobile networks and supports HD quality landlines as well. This year, the company will deploy its LTE-A Carrier Aggregation technology to combine bandwidth available at different frequency bands to improve wireless speeds and reliability.

In April, the country introduced new regulatory policies requiring providers to sell access to their networks at reasonable wholesale prices, spurring competition and letting residents choose between different providers for the first time. Despite the open access rules, investment continues to pour into the UAE’s telecom networks for expansion and upgrades, even as customers see their bills decline.

[flv]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/UAE Weekly Interview Featuring Osman Sultan CEO du 4-20-14.mp4[/flv]

UAE Weekly features du’s CEO Osman Sultan who explains how du is very different from ISPs in other countries, especially in the USA and Canada. Sultan explains du doesn’t use offshore call centers, doesn’t frustrate customers with constant rate increases and usage restrictions, offers nationwide Wi-Fi, and believes in using competition to please customers, not alienate them with tricks and traps. From Dubai CITY TV-7. (April 21, 2014) (21:39)

Frontier’s “High Speed” Fiber Fantasies

Frontier Communications has jumped on the gigabit broadband promises bandwagon with an announcement to investors the company will make available 1,000Mbps broadband speeds available later this year to a small handful of customers.

“I want to note that nearly 10% of our households are served through a fiber to the home architecture,” said Frontier’s chief operating officer Dan McCarthy. “Over the next several quarters we will introduce expanded speed offerings in select markets including 50-100Mbps services. Some residential areas will also be able to purchase up to 1Gbps broadband service. We are excited to bring these new products to market and look forward to making these choices available to our customers.”

Most of Frontier’s fiber customers are part of the FiOS fiber to the home infrastructure Frontier adopted from Verizon in Fort Wayne, Ind., and in parts of Oregon and Washington. The rest of Frontier customers accessing service over fiber are in a few new housing developments and some multi-dwelling units. The majority of customers continue to be served by copper-based facilities.

Despite the speed challenges imposed by distance-sensitive DSL over copper networks, Frontier customers crave faster speeds and more than one-third of Frontier’s sales in the last quarter have come from speed upgrades. As of this month, 54% of Frontier households can receive 20Mbps or greater speed, 75% can get 12Mbps and 83% can get 6Mbps. Here at Stop the Cap! headquarters, little has changed since 2009, with maximum available Frontier DSL speeds in this Rochester, N.Y. suburban neighborhood still maxing out at a less-impressive 3.1Mbps.

Frontier’s plans for the next three months include a growing number of partnerships with third-party equipment manufacturers and software companies, as well as integrating former AT&T service areas in Connecticut into the Frontier family:

Sale of AT&T Connecticut Assets to Frontier Communications Wins Approval from State Attorney General

Connecticut’s Attorney General has announced a deal with Frontier Communications to approve its acquisition of AT&T’s wired assets in the state. The office asked for and got a three-year rate freeze on basic residential telephone rates and a commitment to keep selling standalone broadband at or below Frontier’s current rates. Low-income military veterans would receive basic broadband service for $19.99 per month, a substantial discount off the regular price of $34.99. The first month of service is free.

Frontier will make $500,000 in donations annually to various Connecticut charities, give $512,500 to the University of Connecticut basketball teams, and commit $75,000 to sponsor the Connecticut Open tennis tournament in New Haven.

The phone company has also committed to invest $64 million on network upgrades between 2015-2017, primarily to expand DSL broadband and U-verse service. The company also must undertake to inspect the wireline network it is buying from AT&T and replace deteriorating infrastructure including lines and telephone poles as needed.

Frontier announced it was buying AT&T’s wired assets in December for $2 billion. AT&T will continue to own and operate its wireless network assets in the state. Connecticut was home to AT&T’s only significant landline presence in the northeast. The Southern New England Telephone Company of Connecticut was originally bought by SBC Communications for $4.4 billion in 1998. After SBC purchased AT&T, the telephone company changed its name to AT&T Connecticut. Its primary competitor is Cablevision Industries, which also serves eastern New York and parts of New Jersey. AT&T has aggressively deployed its U-verse platform in Connecticut. Frontier will continue to run and expand U-verse in the state.

Frontier Services and Partnerships Expand

• Customers may have already received marketing for Frontier’s Emergency Phone, a $4.99/mo landline that can only reach 911. Frontier CEO Maggie Wilderotter told investors that global climate change has made weather patterns more unpredictable, making the reliability and resiliency of traditional landlines a “true life line” in the event of an emergency knocking out Voice over IP lines or cell phone service;
• Frontier Texting, powered by Zipwhip, allows customers send and receive text messages using their existing landline numbers. The service appears most popular with business customers, with more 800 signed up so far;
• Frontier third-party technical and security support offers a large range of computer security, home automation, and support services for both hardware and software. Frontier added the Nest thermostat during this quarter, as well as tech support for Intuit QuickBooks and Dropcam remote video monitoring.

Wilderotter Flip-Flops on Gigabit Broadband: You Don’t Need a Gig

Less than three weeks ago, Wilderotter told the Pacific Northwest readers of The Oregonian they didn’t need gigabit broadband speeds:

“Today it’s about the hype, because Google has hyped the gig,” said Wilderotter, in Portland this week for a meeting of her company’s board. She said Google is pitching something that’s beyond the capacity of many devices, with very few services that could take advantage of such speeds, and confusing customers in the process.

“We have to take the mystery and the technology out of the experience for the user because it’s a bit disrespectful to speak a language our customers don’t understand,” said Wilderotter, in Portland this week for a meeting of her company’s board.

Frontier’s pitch: Better prices for more modest speeds. For most people, Wilderotter said, 10 to 12 megabits per second will be perfectly adequate for at least the next couple years. She said Frontier is upgrading its networks in rural communities where it doesn’t offer FiOS to meet that benchmark.

Now that Frontier proposes to offer those speeds, company officials are excited they will be available. Customers shouldn’t be. Most won’t have access for some time to come, if ever.