December 14, 2006

Just Call Him 'Sir Speedy'

By Jim Barthold

Bill DeMuth, CTO at SureWest Communications, doesn't have any worries about bandwidth. He's delivering an unholy 100 Mbps to every residence in the company's 100,000-home fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) serving area in Roseville, CA.

That's enough speed that the company can offer what some might consider a gimmick and some geeks might consider a godsend: 50 Mbps of synchronous data throughout as part of what the service provider accurately called the "Ultimate Package" quadruple play, which also includes digital TV's high-end package, 250 channels and every premium channel; national unlimited local and long distance telephone; and unlimited U.S. wireless with 1,000 travel minutes each month. The price is ultimately high as well, clocking in at $415.18 a month, including the $259.95 for the ultra high-speed data.

"We can do it because we deliver 100 megabits to the home already," DeMuth said.

What? Him worry?

The only concerns seem miniscule. There's the possibility that subscribers might take the high-speed connection and forget about the TV because there's so much free over-the-top content showing up on the Internet these days.

"Our initial studies are that those are probably different markets," DeMuth said. "The people who want this are also the same people who want high definition TV, which is a different experience than over-the-top content that's out there."

The second concern, remarkably, is a little more real. DeMuth has to worry that he ultimately won't have enough bandwidth for the very highest of the high-end subscribers.

"We're still running MPEG-2, so if somebody has more than two HDs that they want simultaneously, plus this, it becomes a challenge," he admitted.

If that's the case, though, "we'll either provide additional fiber into the residence or do something over another wavelength."

Not quite Silicon Valley

For the geographically challenged among us, SureWest's service area is near Sacramento, which, while not quite in the vaunted high-tech Silicon Valley, is close enough that the operator might attract attention from some of those types.

For the most part, though, the company is realistic.

"This is targeted at the early adopters and some of the higher end users downloading big files and wanting it to happen really quickly," a company spokesman said. "It's obviously not a huge target market."

Obviously?

- Jim Barthold