This just in. A friend who is currently a GCI Internet subservient subscriber forwarded an email they received from GCI regarding a complimentary, gratuitous or “just because they felt like it” speed increase. Hooray!

In short, the upspeed is being increased to 1Mbps for some (or all?) of the Xtreme customers. I scoured the GCI.com website and could not confirm the changes for their plans. The graphic still shows the 384K upspeed.

This is a long overdue improvement that will allow people to actually play games on their XBOX 360, upload videos to YouTube and video conference via iChat. According to the email, the upgrades are taking place during this week (January 14, 2008). Thank God, Allah or whatever faith you subscribe to. Amen.

Being the cynic I am, this is a lukewarm and overdue gift from GCI. In typical form, they have incrementally bumped performance to temporarily pacify their customers into hanging on to their high-priced connectivity. I can’t knock them for trying to hang on to that high margin, but what would be the right thing to do is this:

  1. Sell IP (Internet) as a standalone option.
  2. Lower the price.
  3. Increase the speed even more. (10Mbps/5Mbps would be a nice start)
  4. Remove the bundle requirement for unlimited usage.
  5. Get smart and align with IP based businesses to provide entertainment and calling technologies.
  6. Realize you’re just a commodity company that sells bandwidth.
  7. Don’t get me started on your plans to invest $100M in cellular build out.

The demand for IP bandwidth is on the verge of being even more highly demanded by everyday users and the carriers in Alaska should be looking there first before even considering any of their other old-school products/services. As the marketplace continues to release IP dependent services like the new Apple TV video rentals, the market for cable TV will continue to dwindle away. I believe that GCI, ACS and MTA are in for some nasty surprises if they truly believe their current offerings will carry them for much longer.