Midcontinent Rebrands as ‘Midco’

Midcontinent Communications’s long-time nickname is now the MSO's official name. 

The operator's rebrand as “Midco” went official on Tuesday (January 12), as the operator now aims to rev up upgrades that will soon deliver 1-Gig residential broadband service across its footprint.

Midco, which serves more than 330,000 homes and businesses in parts of Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin, also introduced a new logo and is now starting to implement the new branding to marketing materials and other consumer-facing parts of its business.

“We have a lot of ground to cover. Everything from the signs on our buildings to graphics on service vehicles, letterhead, envelopes, and even the apparel our technicians wear will need to be updated,” Trish McCann, Midco’s chief marketing officer said, in a statement, noting that it will be at least a year before the MSO completes the conversion.

“Midco has a long history of blazing new trails and launching the latest technology to deliver communications and entertainment to homes and businesses across the region,” added president and CEO Pat McAdaragh. “Most of our customers already call us Midco. We believe our shortened name, logo and marketing honor our past, and more importantly, point to where we’re going in the future.”

Midco said it’s now pushing ahead on a plan to offer 1-Gig residential broadband in all service areas by the end of 2017.

Last fall, Midco announced that its Fargo-Morehead West area in North Dakota will be the first market to get 1-Gig.

Midconoted in July that it would shift to DOCSIS 3.1, an emerging multi-gigabit platform for HFC networks, using the cBR-8, a new Converged Cable Access Platform (CCAP) from Cisco Systems that combines the functions of the cable modem termination system and edge QAM. Products from five cable modem have already been certified for DOCSIS 3.1 by CableLabs.