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Forgive us a brief segue away from basketball.
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You may have noticed from time to time that we have a rant about Time-Warner's Internet service. Generally it is reasonably reliable, but when there are problems, getting it fixed is almost hopeless. In our most recent encounter with TWC customer service, we spent weeks trying to convince them that there really was a problem, which ultimately turned out to be a damaged piece of cable.
The problem of course is that Time-Warner and the other providers, like Comcast, have next to no competition, so what does it matter? It's their way or the highway.
Fortunately, that seems to be changing and rather quickly, too.
In recent days, Google has announced that Google Fiber will be expanding to new cities. On the list of candidates: Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Cary and Garner (in Wake Forest and Apex, the mayors are wondering why their citie weren't included).
In Austin, the threat of competition from Google spurred Time-Warner to bump their speed up to 300 mbps for the same price. The Triangle can reasonably expect a similar reaction, which is all to the good. But it gets better.
On Tuesday, an outfit called RSTFiber announced ambitious plans to bring fiber to Raleigh beginning in May.
Interestingly, RST will also be providing a la carte TV an uncompressed video suitable for 4K delivery. That's the new ultrahigh standard.
So if this all pans out, three companies will be competing for the local market and those of us in the Triangle will benefit with speed, price and how we are treated.
And even better, our state now, much to our surprise, may have the best gigabyte infrastructure in the country and one which is cutting edge globally.
It's a pretty amazing thing to witness.
On other thing: this comes just as companies like Cablevision and Time-Warner are trying to introduce bandwidth caps. That's over, at least for now. Comcast has been exploring a 300 megabit cap, but with the kind of speeds RST and Google Fiber are talking about, and which Time-Warner will have to compete, that's going to be like serving water from a firehose with a thimble. It can't possibly happen, at least not at the same levels.