WOW! Business serves up 110 Mbps speed tier for SMBs

WOW! Business is taking advantage of the growing opportunity to target small to medium businesses (SMBs) in Detroit and Evansville, Ind., that have outgrown their slower DSL connections from their local telco by offering a new 110/15 Mbps speed tier.

Detroit and Evansville become the fourth and fifth markets where the higher speed cable modem-based tier is available. Previously, the service provider offered the tier in Chicago, Cleveland, and Columbus.

Delivered over traditional cable modems, the 110 Mbps service complements WOW! Business's suite of Internet, voice, data and cloud services.

Beside the new 110 tier, WOW! doubled the speed of its $60 service from 15/2 Mbps to 30/5 Mbps and no longer requires SMBs to bundle their Internet connection with a phone line to get the best service prices.

Brad Cheedle, senior vice president of WOW! Business, told FierceTelecom that not requiring customers to bundle the Internet with other products like voice or video will be a differentiator its cable peers have not brought to the table yet.

"With the Internet, we're making it so you don't have to have a bundle to get it where our peers are forcing you into products or packages that don't necessarily have the best things in mind for those folks," Cheedle said.

Although the products are more geared towards single location customers, Cheedle said that they are "seeing multi-location opportunities" in such segments as "multi-location retail or food services companies where we have some bigger projects underway where they want lots of Internet connections."

It appears that this launch is just part of a broader expansion plan. WOW! Business plans to make its higher speed HFC-based services available to more SMBs. The service provider said that it plans to offer the faster Internet speeds in other Midwest markets in the first quarter of this year.

The service provider is also bringing the service to seven additional Southeast markets: Auburn, Huntsville, Montgomery and Valley, Ala.; St. Petersburg and other parts of Pinellas County, Fla.; Columbus, Ga.; and Lawrence, Kan.   

Cheedle said that markets that will come online this year include Charelston, Augusta, and Panama City after they get the "network improvements there to get the capacity ready to go."

WOW! Business' bets about the 100 Mbps service aren't far off. Cheedle said that they are already seeing strong interest in the 110 Mbps product.

"We've seen a great response and I think we're selling more than we thought we would and a lot at the higher speed," said Cheedle. "It is part of our overall approach to try to simplify the product set because there is so much noise in the marketplace with an overabundance of features so we're listening to the customers and what they want."

For more:
- see the release

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This article was updated with additional information from WOW! Business on Jan. 14.