On Thursday, Qwest announced that it will offer two new fiber-optic Internet connectivity options as part of its Fiber to the Neighborhood (FTTN) initiative. According to PC World and Broadband Reports, the two new levels of service, Quantum and Titanium, will feature download speeds of 12 and 20Mbps and cost $52 and $105, respectively. Both will be available in Qwest’s top 23 markets, across 10 states, including Seattle.

This is great news. Our Seattle-area clients will finally be able to go beyond the 6 Mbps speed limit we’ve all been living under. Yes, Comcast has offered faster uploads for some time, but the availability of their service is quite rare for our clients in Seattle.

The bad news is that it appears Qwest is limiting the upload speeds to somewhere between 896Kbps and 1Mbps, which is super disappointing.

We’ve generally thought of the download speed as the speed of the connection, but with more and more Outlook-enabled mobile devices and employees accessing internal documents and line-of-business applications remotely, the upload speed has quickly become a limiting factor that undermines the vision of a connected, mobile workforce, at least for small businesses. And it’s not like clients can just pay a little more to get higher upload speeds—the service just doesn’t exist.

Also, apparently Qwest has made these new levels of service available on their website, for customers that currently qualify for the new speeds. This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to include X-BAR or one of our clients in Belltown. Keeping our fingers crossed.

Posted by Brad Benner in Small Business, Technology on 26 April 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.