Cox Communications has ratcheted up downstream speeds for its trio of cable modem service tiers.

On the high end, the downstream cap of Cox’s “Premier” tier will jump from 9 Mbps to a range of 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps. The upstream will remain the same at 1 Mbps.

Cox’s flagship “Preferred” service will jump from 4 Mbps downstream, to 7 Mbps. The upstream cap will remain unchanged at 512 kbps.

Cox’s “Value” tier, meanwhile, is rising from a symmetrical 256 kbps to 1.5 Mbps down/256 kbps up. In the downstream, that represents a 486 percent increase, the most pronounced among the tier speed upgrades.

Cox said customers will automatically receive the upgrades, based on their current tier of service. The MSO has applied the upgrade to most territories, save for systems in Central Florida (Gainesville), and Santa Barbara, Calif. Cox has not said when those systems will receive the upgrades, but noted that those markets will have a hand in the timing. 

In addition to faster speeds, Cox also enhanced e-mail storage, growing it from 250 megabytes, to 1 gigabyte per mailbox. The MSO is also testing a new newsgroup service that aims for faster transfers and longer storage of newsgroup posts.

Upgrades such as these have emerged as competition – both in speed and price – has come from telcos offering DSL and, in smaller pockets, Internet services fed by fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) technologies. Cox, meanwhile, has coupled faster speeds with a triple-play service bundle.

“While some telecom companies are just talking about offering faster download speeds along with video and phone service sometime in the future, Cox is actually delivering these advanced services today in markets from coast to coast,” said Cox SVP of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer Chris Bowick, in a statement.