By next month Windstream will have 8-gig internet speeds available to 400,000 households across its Kinetic network in the U.S.
The company claims that's more households than any other carrier, which would make it the nation’s largest 8-gig internet provider.
Over the past year Windstream has taken steps to overbuild fiber on top of its DSL footprint, dedicating a $2 billion capital investment into deploying fiber for under-connected communities.
Kinetic’s DSL network reaches into 18 different states mostly in Southeast and the Midwest. A Windstream rep said that over the course of the next few weeks, households scattered across the Kinetic footprint (330 exchanges, collectively) will have access to the new 8-gig service.
“We have 8-gig deployments dispersed across our 18-state footprint and are not isolating this launch to any specific regions. It is installed by our technicians in all markets,” the rep told Fierce.
Kinetic’s fiber internet installations require a new cable containing fiber-optic and an optical network terminal (ONT), also known as a fiber network terminal. To connect to Wi-Fi, a router and modem is also needed.
With the 8-gig service Kinetic customers will be provided with the latest Wi-Fi 6E equipment, according to the Windstream rep.
The service is part of Windstream’s effort to bring faster speeds and more bandwidth to under-connected Kinetic customers.
In 2022, Windstream won more than $202 million in broadband grants in Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. This year, it scored another $34.9 million in Georgia and applied for several grants in Nebraska.
The company additionally secured $523 million in support covering 18 states from the Federal Communications Commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction, which will be distributed over the course of 10 years. And there is likely still more to come with pending allocations from the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program.
Kinetic’s overall broadband service area is 4.2 million households, with an average community size of 3,000 households. As of now, most of the upgrades from DSL to fiber have been focused on serving rural areas.
In March, residents of Morgantown, Pennsylvania were given access to the Kinetic fiber network. In April, Windstream announced it would target roughly 8,300 locations in Georgia with its Kinetic fiber network, thanks to a new public-private partnership with the state’s Union County.
According to Jeff Small, President of Kinetic, the company plans to build 300,000 fiber passings this year.
“When you look at the end of 2021, we had 164,000 fiber customers. [At the] end of last year, [we’re] up to 289,000,” Small said. That means that at the close of 2022, Kinetic had snagged another close to 125,000 new fiber subscribers.
This month Windstream’s Kinetic Home Internet scored an annual ACSI ranking of 70 –jumping 13% from 2022. ACSI scores customer satisfaction for fiber and non-fiber ISPs.
Industry-wide 8-gig rollouts
Windstream’s Kinetic is one of several providers that have moved fast to get 8-gig services on the market.
In 2022, TDS Telecom introduced an 8-gig product just a year and a half after it doubled the data rates on its top-tier offering to 2 Gbps.
This year Google Fiber announced a new symmetrical 8 Gbps broadband tier, trotting out the service in its newly launched market of Mesa, Arizona. The company also upped the stakes in what has become an industry-wide race to become the fastest provider, claiming it has already achieved download speeds of 20.2 Gbps in testing.
Google Fiber joined Lumen Technologies -- which introduced its own symmetrical 8-gig service for residents and small businesses in August 2022 -- as one of the only big name operators to offer that kind of tier.
Even rural providers are getting involved. C Spire recently rolled out a new 8-gig service tier across its fiber-to-the-home footprint in Mississippi and Alabama, and Altice USA’s Optimum East is publicly planning the launch of an 8-gig tier later this year.
Speaking about the trend toward multi-gig speeds, Lumen Technologies CEO Jeff Storey previously noted “there is an insatiable appetite for bandwidth.”
The Google Fiber 8-gig service costs $150 per month, which is half the price of Lumen’s comparable service tier. That rate includes a Wi-Fi 6 router and up to two mesh extenders.
Windstream has priced its 8-gig service at $299 per month.