Not to be left out of the gigabit hype race, Windstream Communications this week insisted it would offer gigabit fiber service to every market it currently services. Of course Windstream currently only offers gigabit fiber to a few housing developments in Lincoln, Nebraska with plans to potentially offer it in limited portions of five other markets -- maybe.
This very limited gigabit fiber deployment was dressed up to be something much, much more impressive than it actually is by Windstream CEO Tony Thomas at an investor conference this week.
"We are drawing a line in the sand that says we're going to launch a 1 Gbps market in 2015 and if the team overachieves, we'll launch in five," the CEO announced.
"I think after that we're going to launch in every one of our markets a 1 Gbps product because in almost every one of our markets where Windstream competes today we deployed fiber."
The problem with Thomas' narrative? Most Windstream customers currently struggle to get 1 Mbps thanks to a core network in desperate need of upgrades (as our user reviews will attest). Just because there's fiber in parts of Windstream's network doesn't automatically mean users on aging DSL lines (with usage caps) will see fiber anytime soon.
Still, Thomas put on a brave face for investor attendees.
"I am confident that the telcos are going to be very competitive with the cable companies from a product portfolio," the CEO said. "Look at where Windstream does business: We have very few customers per square mile and we're not competing in the urban centers like other telcos do."
Granted the very reason so many Windstream customers in our forums complain about slow, capped, and congested DSL lines is because the company lacks the competitive incentive to upgrade. And in markets they do compete with cable, cable's usually able to offer better speeds courtesy of the relatively inexpensive DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1 upgrade path.
The bottom line is it's rather gutsy of Thomas to be promising one gigabit per second speeds when his company struggles to offer one megabit per second speeds. This isn't just anecdotal opinion: FCC data shows Windstream is one of the worst ISPs in the country at actually delivering advertised speeds. Last year the company also had to pay $600,000 to Georgia's AG for failing to deliver advertised speeds.
Surely there's some Windstream customers who'd like to let Thomas use their DSL lines over the holiday weekend so he's a little more familiar with the
actual state of his company's network?