By Sam Kennedy Of The Morning Call
August 31, 2004

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.

Continued at The Morning Call