FairPoint will soon join the gigabit movement, announcing FairPoint gigabit service will launch in December in select New Hampshire markets. The Portsmouth, New Hampshire region will become the first gigabit market for the tier 2 service provider with most of its operations clustered in northern New England.
“Our fiber-to-the-premise gigabit Internet service rollout demonstrates our commitment to leveraging our extensive fiber network and dense metro Ethernet backbone in response to growing customer demand for higher speed services,” said John Lunny, FairPoint Communications Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer in a press release.
The FairPoint gigabit launch will include a range of broadband tier upgrades for the Portsmouth market, “…starting at 150 megabits-per-second (Mbps), up to 1 Gbps, and upload speeds starting at 75 Mbps up to 1 Gbps.”
The FairPoint gigabit tier will have a promotional price point of $84.99 per month for consumers and $145.99 per month for businesses. The service will be available sometime in December 2015 in Portsmouth and the surrounding communities of Greenland, N.H., New Castle, N.H., Newington, N.H., Rye, N.H. and Stratham, N.H.
FairPoint will be competing with Comcast in Portsmouth, who according to their website offers 105 Mbps as their fastest broadband speed in that market. Comcast has already committed to move their entire footprint to DOCSIS 3.1, giving them the ability to offer gigabit services, although there is no set timetable for individual markets as of yet.
