WPCNR MEDIA WATCHDOG. From Shennell Antrobus, Optimum Online. (Edited) April 22, 2006: Cablevision's Optimum Online announced Friday to WPCNR News that it has completed a major value-added speed increase in the city of White Plains, and introduced a new premium tier service, Optimum Online Boost, offering the fastest broadly-deployed high-speed Internet service for the White Plains home. Verizon, the new player in Westchester in the fight for the internet and cable television market, was unable to be reached for comment.
“Speed matters on the Internet, and we’re happy to give our customers in White Plains more of the speed they want without raising prices," according to a statement by Patricia Gottesman, Cablevision's Executive Vice President of Product Management and Marketing.
According to her statement, " with many more customers using the Internet to send digital photos and download musci, speed is key to a great experience. This recent upgrade has made the top-rated and most popular high-speed Internet service offered anywhere in the nation even faster and more valuable. And, with the addition of our Optimum Online Boost premium tier, we are once again redefining the Internet experience and extending our position as provider of choice in this market (White Plains)."
Claims beats speed whips phone company specs.
The new Optimum Online Boost premium tier delivers downstream speeds of up to 30 megabits-per-second (Mbps) and up to 2 Mbps upstream. This is 39 times faster than the 768K DSL service currently being marketed by phone companies. Maximum speeds of the core Optimum Online service have also been increased, from 10 Mbps to 15 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps to 2 Mbps upstream – a significant speed enhancement at no additional cost.
In addition to faster speeds, Optimum Online Boost includes new features and benefits designed for residential and business customers with higher-bandwidth needs, including:
- Up to 15 e-mail addresses with 1 gigabyte of storage per address, for a total of 15 gigabytes of storage, and the ability to send extremely large e-mail attachments in excess of 20 Megabytes.
- Web hosting capabilities, with tools that enable customers to build and maintain their own Web sites.
- Advanced configurations that include DDNS, Port 25 and Port 80
Verizon, Cablevision's archrival could not be reached for comment on Optimum's new service due to its voice-mail system which does not connect inquiring reporters to a live person, let alone a media spokesperson.
Optimum Online serves more than 1.6 million subscribers, which is more than half of all Internet-connected homes in Cablevision’s service area.
