Cablevision (NYSE: CVC) has been quietly conducting trials of 1-gig Internet service in select New Jersey apartments, posters to DSLReports message boards indicate.
Reps for the pay-TV operator have yet to comment on these reports -- a FierceCable email inquiry sent over this morning has yet to be responded to.
Cablevision did say that it had installed 1 Gbps in a "multi-tenant building" in June, in a throwaway sentence at the end of a press release announcing across-the-board Internet speed increases.
But as cable operators aggressively tout each and every deployment of gigabit-speed service in press releases and earnings reports, Cablevision has remained relatively very quiet on the matter.
Like every other MSO, Cablevision is witnessing the infiltration of competitive one-gig forces in its region.
Atlantic Broadband, for example, recently announced that it will cover its newly acquired Connecticut footprint with DOCSIS 3.1-enabled 1 Gbps services by the end of 2016.
Then of course, there's the looming specter of Cablevision's arch rival, Verizon FiOS (NYSE: VZ), which hasn't ramped up 1-gig services in Cablevision's footprint but seems capable of it. Fran Shammo, executive VP and CFO of Verizon, said a year ago that his company has put in the network infrastructure to support 1 Gbps, but he does not see a market for it today.
"We're now offering 500 Mbps in the home and you could take it to a gig even though there's no application today that would ever need a Gig in the home," Shammo said.
Meanwhile, the idea of having Charter (NASDAQ: CHTR) build a 1 Gbps network was raised in a Sept. 16 report by the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC), which is currently reviewing the proposed Charter-Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) merger. The report said that Charter "could deliver the 1 Gbps service in the five largest markets where TWC currently operates, including the Capital Region."
For more:
- read this DSLReports story
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Cable One set to roll out 1-gig services in 2016