RoadRunner Doubles Up

Looks like Oceanic has upgraded the services of its RoadRunner subscribers for free, and with little fanfare. Upload speeds have been doubled (or, rather, potential upload speeds), a major boon to content creators and users of online storage.

The development is a small technical change but a big move in its battle with Hawaiian Telecom, especially amongst Internet power users.

HiTel, bruised after a rocky ownership and operations transition that made headlines, has from the beginning fought aggressively for a bigger piece of the broadband Internet market. The battle between HiTel's DSL and Oceanic's RoadRunner has been entertaining, and definitely a boon for the consumer. Years ago I dropped RoadRunner for DSL, and haven't looked back.

Then again, it never hurts to look.

Just a few weeks ago, HiTel launched a major advertising campaign to announce the availability of higher speed high-speed access. Downloads of up to 7MB or 11MB (and uploads of up to 1MB), major increases over the standard 3MB down (768k up) that current subscribers have. Since 11MB is, indeed, faster than RoadRunner's advertised (but rarely achieved) 7MB service, HiTel was able to nab the marketing title of "Hawaii's Fastest Internet." Such boasts are shortlived, of course, and Oceanic is indeed planning its own 11MB service tier.

And in the mean time? Doubling upload speeds and asking nothing more than a modem reboot for the upgrade is something definitely worthy of notice. People like "free." And media creators like podcasters and vloggers have long decried the emphasis on downloading, while we're left with infuriatingly slow uploads.

With RoadRunner giving 1MB up to everyone, methinks HiTel better do better than that as part of its new premium service levels. [Via Aaron]