Roughly 3,000 Windstream residential and small-business customers in Lexington now can tap into the city’s first 1-gigabit internet service.
The significantly faster service, which equals roughly 1,000 megabits per second, will allow users to download up to 100 songs in three seconds or a high-definition movie in roughly seven seconds, according to the company. Windstream plans to roll out the service to an estimated 25,000 Lexington customers by the end of 2017, and eventually to most of Fayette County.
“This is a real milestone as we think about the overall modernization of our network,” said Sarah Day, president of consumer and small business for Windstream.
Time Warner Cable, Windstream’s main competitor in the Lexington area, does not yet offer 1-gigabit service but recently announced a new program, called TWC Maxx, that boosts speeds of its Internet services at no increased cost to customers.
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We currently have more than 104,000 customers in the Lexington area. This upgrade represented a significant infrastructure investment for Time Warner Cable,” said spokesman Mike Hogan. “With TWC Maxx, ... we will boost internet speeds for customers up to six times faster, dramatically improve the TV product and set a high bar in our industry for differentiated, exceptional customer service.”
Hogan said standard services will jump to 50 megabits, up from 15 megabits, while the top-end service will receive up to 300-megabit service, up from 50 megabits.
In recent years, Windstream has been working to replace its copper infrastructure with fiber optics deployed all the way to the customer premise, Day said, in addition to using it for new construction projects as they arise. For example, the company has deployed fiber for the development of the Summit, the new retail shopping center going up on Nicholasville Road, Day said.
Day added that while the 1-gigabit service provides faster connections than are practically required for today’s average residential or small-business user, the company’s infrastructure investment is creating a system that will support the community’s needs well into the future.
“It provides a very robust product solution, particularly for the small- and medium-business owners that are underserved in today’s market,” Day said.
Day added that the new service not only will allow small- and medium-sized businesses to benefit directly from higher speeds, but the faster residential connections will be attractive for companies with employees who regularly work from home.
In 2014, Mayor Jim Gray announced his own push for Lexington to become a “gigabit city,” stating that high-speed internet service was crucial for the city’s efforts to recruit and retain businesses. Commerce Lexington Inc. President and CEO Bob Quick said the Windstream announcement will aid the city’s economic development efforts.
“We are excited about Windstream’s efforts to expand ultra-fast gigabit infrastructure in Lexington,” Quick said. “Having gigibit capacity is an additional economic development recruiting tool and something that a growing number of existing businesses, as well as our high-tech industry and others, will be able to benefit from greatly in the coming months.”
The new gigabit service will be available at a cost of $89.99 per month for residential customers or $160 per month for small businesses, with a 12-month commitment, Day said. By comparison, Windstream’s premium services, available at speeds of 50, 75 and 100 Mbps, start at roughly $75 per month.
The new gigabit offering is a symmetrical service as well, Day said, providing 1 gigabit speeds for both downloads and uploads. By comparison, Windstream’s current 50-megabit service, which is not symmetrical, provides 50 megabit service for downloads, but only 8 megabits for uploading.
The move is the latest in a series of infrastructure improvements by the company over the past three years, which have included the expansion of premium speeds of 50- to 100-megabit service and Windstream’s Kinetic television service.
“As we see more consumers adopt it, that will determine the pace at which we continue to deploy the service [in Lexington],” Day said.
The company is also rolling out its 1-gigabit service this month in Lincoln, Nebraska, and to some areas near Charlotte, Day said.