Cox Communications is taking its Gigabit talents to Virginia where the superfast service will be available via a greenfield fiber build to homes in the Viridian Reserve at Hickory in Chesapeake.
The 1-Gig service, which Cox calls “G1GABLAST,” will be available near the end of next year to 165 homes in the new housing development.
“We are excited about our road map to offer gigabit speeds to all of our residential customers,” said Cox Communications President Pat Esser. “We are deploying new technology and infrastructure that will offer our customers the choice of gigabit speeds in all markets we serve.”
Cox laid claim to being the first national communications provider to commit to a residential Gigabit offering in Virginia.
“We are proud of our long-standing commitment to the Hampton Roads community,” said Gary McCollum, senior vice president and region manager for Cox Virginia. “Cox is driven by our customer feedback and we will continue our investment to deliver what customers have come to expect from us: industry leading products and services and a superior customer experience.”
Cox’s 1-Gig residential service will light up its first customer in Phoenix by the end of this week, according to a Cox spokesman. In addition to Virginia and Phoenix, Cox has also announced that Las Vegas and Omaha are also slated for G1GABLAST with more announcements to follow.
In Phoenix, where Cox previously said 1-Gig would be available to 5,000 homes by the end of this year, the fiber-based service costs $69.99 when bundled with other Cox offerings, but other than saying “pricing will be competitive” Cox hasn’t announced how much the service will cost in Virginia.
Cox said it would expand the availability of the residential Gigabit service to greenfield developments across Virginia and across the country. Cox has previously said it will have the Gigabit tier in 150,000 homes in Phoenix by the end of 2015 and in all of its markets by the end of 2016.
Cox has also upgraded the downstream speeds on two of its most popular data tiers across some of its systems. The speed of Cox’s Preferred tier was increased from 25 Mbps down to 50 Mbps while the Premier offering ramped up from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps. Cox said the Preferred and Premier tiers represented more than 70 percent of its data customers.