GCI plans digital expansion for Mat-Su

MAT-SU -- It's been two years since GCI purchased Valley cable provider Roger's Cable, and company officials say area customers will soon begin to see the fruits of the purchase, in the form of expanded and enhanced services.

"We put in about seven and a half million dollars worth of capital improvements," said David Morris, GCI's vice president of corporate relations. "We've taken a lemon and we're turning it into something really special."

When purchased, Morris said, the infrastructure that made up Roger's Cable had not been expanded or improved significantly in recent years. Roger's is a Canadian-based company, and the Valley office was one of just a few cable providers the company owned. There were several glitches in the programming -- poor signals and problems with pay-per-view programming that kept that feature from ever getting off the ground.

"They weren't likely to make any further investments in the cable company," William Riley Snell, GCI's vice president and general manager of the company's cable operations. Meanwhile, he said, GCI was beginning to see potential merits in investing in the company.

"It really was a missing link, operation-wise," Snell said.

After purchasing the company for $19 million, GCI officials made the decision to begin expansion -- a project that will begin in March and is scheduled to be complete by June. The biggest portion of the project, Morris said, will be adding digital options to their existing system.

"When the June modifications are complete, Palmer and Wasilla will have the first all-digital cable system in the U.S.," Morris said.

All packages above basic programming, he said, will be digital. Along with better picture quality, Morris said, will come more choices and service tiers.

Robert Ormberg, GCI's vice president of cable marketing and programming, said the project will be broken into eight nodes, or areas of expansion covering their approximately 7,500 households. The customers to go through expansion first will be those along the Parks Highway, from Nye Ford to Knik-Goose Bay Road. Other areas will go through the expansion throughout the spring, he said, with the Butte community being the final area planned for digital upgrades.

The expansion, Ormberg said, will mean GCI customers can choose from 180 channels. Of that number, 45 new channels will be musical programming and 30 will be pay-per-view options.

"We're bringing a much more robust product out here in the Valley," Ormberg said.

Of course the capital investment must be made up in some manner, but Ormberg said existing customers won't be facing price hikes in June -- their prices will be fixed, he said.

"A lot of folks' pricing will stay the same and be 'grandfathered' for a period of time, even though we're adding product," Ormberg said.

Morris said customers will have more options to customize their system and upgrade or add services as they choose. One of the benefits of the expansion, he and Ormberg said, is that all customers above basic programming will have a cable box in their household that they can use to upgrade their services or order pay-per-view programming without needing a cable truck to stop by.

While switching to digital programming is, in itself, a big leap for the company, Snell said it's not the only expansion GCI is planning. Between 500 and 700 homes are expected to be added to GCI's customer base this year, Snell said, with a large amount of the customer expansion taking place in the Wasilla area, near GCI's Main Street and Bogard Road office.

"This isn't the end of the story," Snell said. "We're continuing to see the Valley as one of the fastest growing areas in the state and we will continue to demonstrate our commitment to the Valley."