Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Cox Ups Speed in Phoenix

Cox Communications is bumping up the speeds of its cable modem service in Phoenix. For customers with Cox's Preferred service, downloads will move from 7 Mbps per second to 9 Mbps, with upload speeds increasing from 512 kilobytes per second to 768 kbps.

For the Premier service, customers will get 15 Mbps with burst of up to 20 Mbps for download speeds with uploads starting at 1.5 Mbps and capable of bursts up to 2 Mbps.

The additional speed comes at no additional cost. Qwest Communications is upping its digital subscriber line service to 12 Mbps for its lower-cost service and 20 Mbps for its higher-cost service.

Still, there are some who argue the United States is "falling behind" other nations, suffering from inadequate supply, high prices, slow speeds, or all of the above. One can argue about that.

One cannot argue the problem is not being addressed. Speeds keep climbing, for the same amount of money, everyplace telcos and cable compete with each other.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gary, is Cox increasing speeds or decreasing them? If they are taking users from 7 Megabytes (MBps) per second to 9 Mbps (Mega bits per second) doesn’t that decrease speeds 8x? Also, are they really handicapping the “Premier” subscribers by cutting them back to 15 Mbps with bursts of up to 20 Mbps? I’d cancel my premier subscription if I realized that the people paying for basic service were getting 56Mbps compared to my 20Mbps max!

Gary Kim said...

Ah, right. Just a typo. All speeds in Mbps.

Directv-Dish Merger Fails

Directv’’s termination of its deal to merge with EchoStar, apparently because EchoStar bondholders did not approve, means EchoStar continue...