Independent cable MSO Midcontinent is continuing a DOCSIS 3.0 roll out across the Midwest. They announced that their Pierre and Ft. Pierre South Dakota markets will be turned up on Monday August 17th.
Where Midco offers wideband, it’s branded as ‘MidcoNet Ultimate’ and offers 50 Mbps downstream and 5 Mbps upstream. Its unbundled price point is $124.95. Like their larger MSO brethren, Midco bumps up their other cable modem speeds in conjunction with DOCSIS 3.0 launches, taking their mid tier product, MidcoNet Preferred, to 15 Mbps downstream, from 10 Mbps. Midco also offers DOCSIS 3.0 in West Fargo, ND and Sioux Falls, SD, with additional markets planned. Midco’s wideband expansion demonstrates that DOCSIS 3.0 is not only reserved for major markets.
Are you facing wideband competition? If so, where, and how are you addressing it?
One quick note: "there" should be "their" at "Midco bumps up there other cable modem speed".
Anyway, a rather big upgrade as well is in the Midco Max department. While you can argue that going from uncapped to 25 Mbps is a downgrade, Midco is now setting the expectation of a nice high speed on that tier (higher in fact than Comcast's low-end DOCSIS 3.0 tier on the download side). MidCo also notched upload speed up to 2 Mbps on the Midco Max tier, up from 768 kbps.
While this theoretically means you can't have two Midco Max users max'ing out their connections at the same time, Midco is probably betting on high-end users upgrading to their 50/5 DOCSIS 3.0 package, so there will be plenty of channels (four, to be exact) for heavy cable users to play in.
Thanks for catching my 'dyslexia moment.' Great insight. Appreciate the comments.
What is the Midco Max — is it full/uncapped downstream access to the 38 Mbps (pre-supposing 256-QAM)?
Frank