Atlantic Broadband has joined its large cable cousins like Comcast in extending 1 Gbps services via DOCSIS 3.1 to 37,000 customers, and the MSO sees the product as a way to address smaller business customers.
While Atlantic Broadband has built a sizable presence amid medium and large business customers providing fiber-based metro Ethernet services, the advent of 1 Gbps business service can address SMBs it could not reach with a fiber solution.
By launching Pro GigaEdge, new area businesses customers in eight eastern Connecticut cities can get the service for $249.99 per month.
“We’ve had gigabit Ethernet services for businesses for some time, but the new news is making that more widely available at a great value to smaller businesses,” said David Isenberg, president and chief revenue officer for Atlantic Broadband in an interview with FierceTelecom.“It’s about driving that gigabit class speed into more businesses.”
But 1 Gbps download is just one element of Atlantic Broadband’s business upgrade strategy. The cable MSO also raised the upload speeds of their business services offering.
Specifically, the service provider’s Pro Edge 250 Mbps package raised the upload speed to 25 Mbps, while the Pro GigaEdge offers a 50 Mbps upload speed.
“There is a need and a demand for faster speeds on the business side of the house as well as the residential side of the house,” Isenberg said. “A key part of what we did is we increased all of our upstream speeds and before we launched our Pro GigaEdge our fastest upstream speed was 20 Mbps so it’s a two-and-a-half (megabit) lift in the fastest upstream speed in our footprint.”
Isenberg added that increasing the upstream speed is increasingly becoming a bigger priority for business customers.
“For businesses, the upstream speed is more important than in the residential world,” Isenberg said. “When you talk about metro Ethernet services those are not as deeply available as our DOCSIS plant goes and so this is really about bringing 250 Mbps and gigabit class services to a much wider scope within the community."
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