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Internet Provider Offers Fastest Download Speed to Allentown, Pa., Area

Posted on: Monday, 30 August 2004, 06:00 CDT

Aug. 31--The fastest residential Internet service in the country is available in parts of the Lehigh Valley.

RCN Corp. has begun offering Internet service with a download speed of 7 megabytes per second, ratcheting up the level of competition among Internet service providers and widening the digital divide between the haves and have-nots of high-speed Internet access.

By comparison, the fastest download speed from Service Electric Cable TV & Communications, RCN's primary local rival, is 3.5 mbps. The fastest from Blue Ridge Communications, the cable company serving the northern portion of the greater Lehigh Valley, is 3 mbps. And a digital subscriber line, or DSL, from telephone companies Verizon and AT&T tops out at 1.5 mbps.

RCN's one-upmanship has left its competitors arguing that most residential Internet customers don't need the extra speed.

RCN, of Princeton, N.J., operates in some of the biggest U.S. markets, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and launched MegaModem Mach 7 nationwide earlier this month.

Customers of RCN's premium service, which costs $51.65, were automatically upgraded from the 5 mbps to 7 mbps service at no extra cost. Similarly, those with standard service, which costs about $10 less, were bumped up from 3 mbps to 5 mbps service.

The new speeds are available to just over half of 175,000 homes within RCN's Lehigh Valley footprint -- those that have access to two-way high-speed Internet service. Those with one-way service, which requires a phone line for uploading, will see no change.

Although incremental, the difference between 7 mbps and 5 mbps is magnified when large amounts of data are downloaded. It shaves two seconds off the five-second download time of the typical pop song and two minutes off the five-minute download time of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell video game.

For less data-intensive activities, such as Web surfing and e-mail, the extra speed is virtually imperceptible.

"You're talking about fractions of a second, and people really don't see it," Service Electric spokesman Jack Capparell said. And of those who do, he added, few are willing to pay for the extra speed.

"We listen to our customers," echoed Mark Masenheimer, Blue Ridge's general manager. "I haven't heard our customers say our cable modem is too slow."

Internet speed depends largely on the amount of fiber optic cable in a network. More cable means greater bandwidth, essentially a bigger pipe through which data can flow.

RCN has faster Internet service than other cable companies because it runs a bundle of 12 fiber optic cables, or fibers, between the hub in every town or neighborhood and the nodes that serve a cluster of homes, according to Elad Nafshi, RCN's Internet director. Most other cable companies have just three to five fibers between the hub and node, he said.

"We built this network from the ground up with broadband in mind," Nafshi said.

Service Electric and Blue Ridge, however, said such comparisons are overly simplistic because their networks have a different architecture altogether.

Either way, Service Electric and Blue Ridge are, to a certain extent, isolated from pressure from RCN because the three cable companies operate mostly in mutually exclusive areas. Much of the Lehigh Valley, for example, is divided into sections that have access to either RCN or Service Electric, but not to both.

Other Internet technologies, such as DSL and wireless service, are seen as the greater threat because they compete head-to-head with the cable industry, according to Service Electric and Blue Ridge.

As a marketing tool, at least, the value of 7 mbps Internet service is clear, said Adi Kishore, an analyst with the Yankee Group, a Boston market-research firm. "The consumer says, 'Oh, it's faster.'"

As for those Lehigh Valley residents stuck with one-way high-speed Internet service, RCN offered no indication of when help would be on the way. Nearly half of the region doesn't have access to two-way high-speed cable Internet service.

RCN, which expects to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection later this year, has yet to install the fiber and other infrastructure necessary for two-way cable in about 45 percent of its coverage area. The areas that have not been upgraded are mostly centrally located urban neighborhoods, including most of Bethlehem.

The imbalance is a legacy of RCN's strategy to build its network. RCN started in rural areas, pressing inward before running out of cash to finish the job.

Service Electric, too, lacks two-way cable infrastructure in just under half of its coverage area. In Service Electric's case, however, the areas that have not been upgraded are mostly rural or suburban, such as parts of Upper and Lower Macungie townships, because it started building in the center of the Lehigh Valley and pushed outward.

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