On Monday Midcontinent Communications unveiled its “Gigabit Frontier Initiative” that will eventually make gigabit speeds available to 600,000 homes and 55,000 businesses via a fiber network that covers more than 7,600 miles across the Northern Plains.
Work on the Midcontinent Gigabit Frontier Initiative is slated to start next year with the first cities expected to be the metro areas of Fargo, Bismarck and Grand Forks, N.D. along with Sioux Falls and Rapid City, S.D.
“As the gold standard, gigabit Internet delivers a speed that the vast majority of Americans can only dream of accessing,” said Pat McAdaragh, president and CEO of Midcontinent Communications.
McAdaragh also pointed out that Midco’s gigabit service won’t be limited to a few neighborhoods in the largest cities of its footprint, which was a veiled shot at companies such as AT&T and Google Fiber that cherry pick the more affluent neighborhoods for their respective gigabit services. By contrast, Midcontinent’s 1-Gig service will reach 98 percent of its subscribers by the end of 2017. Midcontinent said on its website that pricing for the 1-Gig service would be announced as the service becomes available.
“In addition to increasing our speed, we are also improving our network capacity. This year alone, our customers’ bandwidth usage has increased by 77 percent. Consumption doubles every 15 months, and I don’t see it slowing down,” said Jon Pederson, vice president of technology at Midcontinent Communications. “As our customers invent and discover new ways to use the Internet, Midcontinent will have the enhanced bandwidth to support their success and deliver a superior user experience.
In an email to CED this morning, Pederson provided some details on the 1-Gig build out.
“To complete our Gigabit Frontier Initiative, we will be using a combination of HFC with DOCSIS 3.1 cable modems and FTTP (fiber-to-the-premise) utilizing either fiber from the node, RFoG or direct fiber as the need warrants,” he wrote. “For newer systems our HFC configuration is fiber deep. Legacy systems are node+x with an ongoing evolution to node+1 as nodes are split in response to strong growth. In that sense, the build of our fiber network is ongoing and continually improving.”
Earlier this year, Midcontinent doubled the speeds on most of its data tiers, which included the debut of a 200 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up service. Along with the 200 Mbps service option, Midcontinent also offers tiers of up to 100 Mbps/10 Mbps and up to 60 Mbps/6 Mbps. Midcontinent has previously said it was bonding eight channels on the downstream and two on the upstream with 80 percent of its cable modems DOCSIS 3.0 based.
Midcontinent serves more than 300,000 customers throughout North Dakota and South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Among the 1-Gig contenders, AT&T, Grande Communications, Google Fiber, Suddenlink Communications, TDS Telecom, CenturyLink, Bright House Networks, Atlantic Broadband, Comporium, and Cox Communications have, or plan to have 1-Gigabit services available in parts of their respective service areas.
