dslwanter Side by side, Omni looks quite competitive across the board. I know to take some of the broadband facts with a grain of salt, but even if they are actually getting ~10ms regionally and ~20ms to more distant destinations, it’d be such a huge improvement over the 25-35+ ms I see out of TWC/Charter across the board. It’s basically 25 ms to Columbus, and 30+ to Chicago where most of their preferred routes seem to go.
With autopay and e-bill discounts, symmetric gigabit with 4+ ms latency for $85 would be an incredible value compared to what I’m used to seeing in my cable monopoly-ish (we can still get DSL here, but who would?) area. Armstrong getting $110 for gigabit fiber is overpriced, no question. They’re in denial and going to feel it when flyers from Lumos, Omni, and AT&T start showing up in people’s mailboxes. Not just the rack rate, but promotional prices are going to push a lot of people to switch and re-evaluate their options every year. Even when T-Mobile Home Internet and Verizon 5G Home Internet showed up a couple years ago, I saw posts online of people basically saying, “yeah it’s wireless, but it’s ‘good enough’ for half the price.” A lot of people living in Armstrong territory have gone decades with no other option before. Armstrong ought to heed this time to build some good will among its customers and adopt some competitive pricing changes or promotions that people can lock in now, because simply being the previously only incumbent ISP and people’s inertia of keeping what they’re used to is not going to work when Omni or Lumos can save people $25+ every month in real, actual money, not even including whatever promotions they offer.
Even Charter/Spectrum is “only” $100 rack rate for gigabit now. Sure, this market doesn’t have high-split yet, so it’s 940 down/35 up officially (closer to 1100 down/42 up actual with overprovisioning). But I’ve seen T-Mobile and Verizon get better latency on their cellular networks than I’ve gotten out of Spectrum cable. And along with Lumos, Omni, MetroNet, and altafiber; Spectrum high-split will bring symmetric gigabit in another year or two. I’ll take $85/mo fiber over $100/mo cable any day of the week for the price as well as the better latency. These cable providers’ days of taking advantage of their captive customers stuck inside their monopoly territories are finally numbered.
