SBC ups DSL speeds

SBC today announced it has begun offering tiered-speed broadband service, increasing the maximum bandwidth of its consumer ADSL product to 3 Mb/s.

The service brings SBC close to matching the higher capacity services of cable broadband as most cable operators top out at 4 Mb/s. But SBC is also keeping its prices relatively low, offering the service for about $37 a month as part of a long-distance/local/wireless bundle and at $45 a month with basic phone service. Previously SBC offered a single tier with speeds guaranteed at 384 kb/s and topping out at 1.5 Mb/s, but SBC officials said after a trial in February across its territory, the carrier found that many customers were willing to pay more each month for a faster grade of service.

“With things like digital photography and other bandwidth-intensive applications out on the market, we found that there was a niche of broadband users looking for more speed,” an SBC spokesman said. “We got a strong response from our trial, and we expect the service to be popular across all of our customer segments.”

SBC will add a similar high capacity tier for its business customers and will transfer its Yahoo portal and content services to both business and consumer versions of the service. SBC gave no specifics on network improvements that allowed it to push speeds upwards, but company officials said that the higher data-rate service would be available to the majority of its current customers regardless of how far they are from their central offices.

SBC is not the only RBOC to try tiered services. Both Verizon and BellSouth have been experimenting with higher bandwidth “turbo” consumer DSL offers, and Qwest Communications has launched a low-tier budget broadband service which caps speeds at 128 kb/s.