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Saturday, September 19, 2015

Mi-Connection to increase speeds in Q4 of this year

Back on September 8th, the municipally owned cable company, Mi-Connection, quietly announced on its Facebook page that faster broadband speeds are on the way to subscribers in November.

According to a series of posts to its page over the past few days, subscribers will see speed increases from 233% to 275% depending on the tier they currently receive.  The increases will be "free of charge".

Users who currently get 15Mbps download speeds will see their service bumped to 50Mbps.  20Mbps becomes 75Mbps and 30Mbps becomes 100Mbps.  Upload speeds remain unchanged for each tier at 5, 10, and 10Mbps respectively.

Readers may remember back in May, we told you about MiC testing faster service in response to the rapidly changing competitive environment.   It would appear that these service increases are part of that same response.

When asked about the speed upgrades, Mi-Connection CEO, David Auger, had this to say:

"We periodically have increased internet speeds over the last few years. The decisions to do so, and the amount of each speed increase, are mostly driven by market demand and competitive activity. Technical considerations do play a role and that is primarily what we were testing some time ago. We are confident the speed increases that will be implemented this fall will allow us to grow broadband customers at the same rate as the previous five years."

Whether that is true or not remains to be seen.

When Time Warner began rolling out its upgraded service dubbed TWCMaxx its top speeds were considerably faster that what Mi-Connection customers will receive after the upgrade.  While the lowest tiers will be the same for download speeds at 50Mbps.  The TWCMaxx top speeds for its middle and upper tier services will offer speeds of 200Mbps and 300Mbps respectively - considerably faster than what Mi-Connection will offer.

Of course the argument can be made that few users actually need the TWCMaxx top speeds, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out with new developments in the Mi-Connection footprint - particularly around its edges.

A big chunk of Mi-Connection's growth in the past couple of years has been from exceptionally high penetration rates at the new Langtree development at Exit 31.  If Mi-Connection loses out on some of the new developments in the area because it doesn't match the top speeds of its competitors, that certainly could impact growth projections.

Mooresville and Davidson taxpayers better hope that is not the case.

More information should be on the way soon.  Auger said the company  "will be sending out an additional press release early next week announcing the speed increase migration path for residential customer". 

Be on the lookout for that.



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