CLEARLAKE, Calif. – Mediacom Communications announced on Monday that it has pushed the accelerator pedal to deliver 105-meg Internet download speeds – offering broadband service in Lake County that is more than twice as fast as the speeds it launched just 10 months ago with the innovative technology known as DOCSIS 3.0.

Mediacom’s Ultra 105, now available to homes and businesses in Clearlake, Lakeport and the surrounding area, will download Internet data at a rate of 105 mega-bits-per-second (Mbps).

With its upload speed of 10 Mbps, the service receives and sends data twice as fast as the Ultra 50 Internet service Mediacom introduced in February.

The boost makes Lake County one of only a few non-urban areas in California to offer broadband speeds at or above the 100-mark, according to Shawn Swatosh, Mediacom’s senior operations manager for northern California.

“The speed threshold we set earlier in the year with Ultra 50 has been very popular, but people who consume a lot of bandwidth are asking for even more. Fortunately, our fiber-based network was built with the ability to scale up to the faster speeds of Ultra 105, and it’s ready for future needs as well,” Swatosh said.

He explained that requests for faster speeds have come from local businesses, as well as residential homes where multiple family members use separate laptops, tablets, gaming consoles and other devices to download entertainment, sports programming and other data.

“Customers in Lake County, like consumers nationally, rely on the Internet for more bandwidth-intensive uses than ever before. Our speed boost to Ultra 105 comes on the heels of a new study released by Netflix ranking Mediacom as one of the top 6 fastest major Internet service providers in nation,” Swatosh said. “Millions of consumers stream hours of video content every month, and that’s just one example of the bandwidth consumption that creates the demand for exceptionally-fast broadband performance like Mediacom’s Ultra 50, and now Ultra 105.”

Swatosh said a high-definition (HD) movie (6 gigabytes) can be downloaded in just 8 minutes using Mediacom Ultra 105, as compared to the 8.8 hours it would take to download the same movie using a common 1.5 Mbps DSL service from a traditional phone company.

Online streaming for a standard definition (SD) television show needs just 24 seconds of download time using Ultra 105, compared to 26 minutes with the DSL service.

Mediacom was among the earliest cable companies to offer the new-generation broadband service of DOCSIS 3.0, which it makes available to both residential and business customers. Each Mediacom Ultra 50 or Ultra 105 customer is equipped with a new, more powerful modem configured for the higher Internet speeds.

Mediacom Communications is the nation's eighth largest cable television company and one of the leading cable operators focused on serving the smaller cities in the United States, with a significant concentration in the Midwestern and Southeastern regions.