Slic Network Solutions residential customers in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties in New York just had their internet speeds doubled through what the company is calling a "silent" and painless upgrade.
Depending on the service package, those customers can now get upload and download speeds of up to 100 Mbps.
Mark Dzwonczyk, president and CEO of Nicholville Telephone Company, Slic's parent company, told FierceTelecom the upgrade to its fiber network was done at the headend at the company's central office in New York. Slic provisions through remote cabinets with blades supporting FTTH and each premise has its own ONT.
"We simply do an integration change to enable the optics to work at a higher speed," Dzwonczyk said. "So it's completely transparent, no pun intended."
Dzwonczyk said the timing for the speed boost correlates with Slic's plans to open up new territories as well as an internal decision to restructure the service packages.
Slic recently announced Long Lake, New York in the Adirondacks area as a gigabit fiber community and the company plans to connect similar service in about eight to 10 more towns in the area over the next 18 months, Dzwonczyk said.
"The core network is gigabit and we thought this is a good time, as we rolled out the first pricing for Long Lake, we thought it was a good time to upgrade the rest of our network," Dzwonczyk said.
But for now, most of Slic's footprint won't be getting the option to buy gigabit service because Dzwonczyk said his company doesn't see much of a market for it yet.
"These are previously unserved homes, people who didn't have any broadband beforehand," Dzwonczyk said. "Going from a dial-up modem to 10 to 15 Mbps is a huge upgrade," adding it's probably too soon for those customers to see the value in gigabit.
For more:
- see this press release
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