Hagerstown, Maryland, operator Antietam has become the latest cable organization to purge its business origin from its company name, announcing a change in its moniker from Antietam Cable to Antietam Broadband.
“Our customers need and rely on fast access to the internet,” said Antietam President Brian Lynch in a statement. “The new name, Antietam Broadband, reflects how our customers use our products and services today.”
Antietam is owned by South Bend, Indiana, conglomerate Shurz Communications, which also owns Coral Springs, Florida-based Advanced Cable Communications; Maricopa, Arizona’s Orbitel Communications; and Sergeant Bluff, Iowa’s Long Lines, not to mention over a dozen newspapers and websites.
For its part, Antietam has already invested $6 million in its Flight Internet project, its quest to bring symmetrical gigabit-speed services to 11,000 Maryland homes and businesses with a fiber-to-the-home network.
“Antietam will continue to evolve as technology changes,” Lynch added. “We have the people, products and services to serve the community for years to come.”
Antietam is hardly the only cable-related company or group to take the word “cable” out of its name. Perhaps most notable is the cable industry’s biggest lobbying organization, NCTA, which rebranded to make the acronym its name, and also rebranded its “Cable Show” into “INTX” before scrapping the event last year. Like Antietam, NCTA described the change as befitting an organization focused on emerging digital technologies and attempting to broaden its scope.
Of course, anybody reading this month’s New Yorker, which includes a short piece titled “Why we despise cable providers,” has to wonder: How much of this relates to the term “cable” now being so negatively charged? Lynch didn’t immediately respond to FierceCable’s email this morning asking that question.