As promised last year, Covad Communications is now offering ADSL2+ to small businesses in 11 metropolitan markets, featuring data service at speeds up to 15 Mb/s downstream.

The stand-alone data offering is targeted at very small businesses, those five employees or less, and SoHo customers, who are looking for speed and willing to accept a lower service level agreement than a T-1 service would offer, said Anne Merkert, vice president of product marketing at Covad. The service is a business-class offering, and is available at speeds of up to 15 Mb/s, 10 Mb/s and 8 Mb/s downstream and 1 Mb/s upstream.

“It hits a sweet spot in the small business market,” Merkert said. “We are hearing from customers who are unhappy with a consumer grade of service that has no or limited SLAs or lower speeds. This is a service with higher speeds with an SLA, designed for businesses willing to pay for that right fit of value and speed.”

The 11 cities are Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. The service is being delivered over an upgraded network, powered by Samsung access gear, which was funded by EarthLink, a Covad partner and provider of line-powered voice services over the same network.

The new offering positions Covad to compete more effectively as more players begin to court small business companies, including the cable industry.

“We do think this positions us to compete well in this market,” Merkert said. “The service has a number of competitive advantages – it has comparable speeds to cable and it is a dedicated line service. People that have been unsatisfied with cable because it is a shared service so speed is going to vary depending on how many people are using it.”