Mediacom bringing their services to Foley

By Jessica Vaughn / jessica@gulfcoastmedia.com
Posted 6/28/17

FOLEY – For those who are tired of having a limited choice when it comes to internet and cable options, Mediacom has heard you, and soon they will be bringing their services into the Foley …

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Mediacom bringing their services to Foley

Posted

FOLEY – For those who are tired of having a limited choice when it comes to internet and cable options, Mediacom has heard you, and soon they will be bringing their services into the Foley area.

Jason Clabo, Mediacom Director of Area Operations, and Paul Pecora, Vice President of Operations, Southeast Region, attended the June 19 Foley council meeting to present their plan. Currently, Mediacom services many areas surrounding Foley, which will allow them to come in from multiple sides when expanding their network. Their plan is to begin with any under serviced areas that do not have any cable provider as things are now, including the Iberville and Parish Lakes Subdivisions. While Riviera has serviced the areas for a while, there are still neighborhoods that are without service.

“We’re going to build up from a vault that we have on County Road 12, go up Highway 59, and then over to South Juniper Street,” Clabo explained. “Then we can go up to get to the Parish Lakes and Iberville neighborhoods and build out that area.”

The company is ready to begin the project, and is confident that they should be able to start offering services to these areas quickly, as well as another area currently without service that is outside of the Foley city limits. By moving into areas immediately outside the city limits, Mediacom is granted the opportunity to move further into neighborhoods that are within the city. Eventually, they do hope to service the entire Foley area.

“We haven’t made it any secret that we’ve actually made an offer to Riviera Cable,” Clabo said. “Our desire would be to purchase that plant and then be able to upgrade it to be able to offer the same product as we offer across the whole area. We would like to be able to go in and service the areas that are not currently being serviced by Riviera, and eventually we would like to cover this whole area with our plant, service all these customers.”

If the deal with Riviera does go through, then Mediacom would be able to more quickly spread their service area not just into Foley, but all the way into Summerdale, Clabo said.

This move would grant Mediacom the possibility of opening a central office in Foley. While not in the plans currently, there would be an opportunity for a Foley-based office depending on the number of customers that would be served within the area, and how many service calls Mediacom will be making in the area. The technicians try to respond to outages and calls within 24 to 48 hours, and Mediacom is no stranger to moving staffing accordingly.

“Our business is just growing so fast that we’ve had to move staffing around depending on where those growth areas are,” Paul Pecora said. “It’s just something that we look at several times throughout the day, as to how far out customers are being scheduled.”

Until a local office moves in, Mediacom does already operate offices out of Loxley and Gulf Shores.

“One of the things that we’re going to be able to offer is high speed internet services,” said Clabo. “Right now the 60mbps service is our base line for internet, it’s our slowest speed that we offer to our customers. We also offer 100 to 200mbps, and when you have speed like that you can have 4 to 5 devices without any lag time.”

Mediacom will also be launching a 1Gig service by the end of 2017 across their entire footprint, which will also include the neighborhoods that they are building into within Foley.

Along with internet, Mediacom offers cable packages, with the basic package including 52 channels, 15 HD, and plans that go up to 405 channels including 146 HD channels.

“There’s a very large amount of products and services that are available for our customers,” Clabo said. “So that’s really just a broad overview, we’re going to be coming into the area, and we’re going to be offering a high level of service.”

“We offer a triple play product, which is video, high speed data, and phone,” Pecora said. “Depending on the level of those services you want, then we package the prices accordingly, and for new customers they all end up on promotional rates as well. When you offer three different products like we do, there’s hundreds of different combinations you can subscribe to, with digital, sports and information, if you want 60mbps of speed or something higher. We do our best to try to customize a package for whatever your interests are.”

Moving Mediacom service into Foley will not happen overnight, but the company plans to move into under serviced neighborhoods in the area shortly. From there, they will be spreading their network out over the course of the year, so more areas should soon have a new option when it comes to service.