Lawrence’s largest Internet service provider announced Wednesday that by January it will double the top speeds it offers local users of Internet service.

Officials with WOW announced that the company will begin offering both residential and business service of 110 Mbps in January. WOW expects to make several more announcements about upgraded speeds throughout 2015. Currently, 50 Mbps is the top speed available via WOW’s standard Internet service packages.

“The exciting thing is this is just the first of several announcements we’ll be making in 2015,” said Debra Schmidt, WOW’s system manager for Lawrence and the surrounding area.

The announcement comes two weeks before Lawrence city commissioners are scheduled to again debate whether to provide a $1 million loan guarantee to Lawrence-based Wicked Broadband. Wicked is seeking the loan guarantee to help it launch a pilot project to bring to Lawrence gigabit service , which is equivalent to 1,000 mbps and is the same type of super-fast Internet service being provided by the Google Fiber project in the Kansas City area.

It wasn’t clear on Wednesday how WOW’s announcement may change the city’s consideration of the $1 million loan guarantee. City Commissioner Mike Dever called the WOW announcement a “fantastic change in philosophy” by the company, but said higher speeds still may be needed to attract the type of technology businesses Lawrence is seeking.

“I think this is a very good step forward, but hopefully it is just a stopgap measure in receiving even higher speeds in the community,” Dever said.

Schmidt did not rule out WOW providing gigabit service at some point. She said the company expects to make other announcements about speed upgrades in 2015, but she said it was difficult to forecast what those speed levels would be.

The company will offer the 110 Mbps service everywhere that WOW service is offered, including in Eudora and the other outlying areas it serves. Pricing plans for the service are being developed and are expected to be announced in November, Schmidt said. Lawrence is the first market in the country where WOW is offering the high-speed service.

As currently planned, the 110 Mbps service only will be for download speeds, meaning that users will benefit from the quicker speeds when streaming video, downloading files from an office server or other functions that involve pulling information off the Web. But WOW is not planning to offer the 110 Mbps service for uploading tasks, such as posting video online or moving large files to a file-sharing service. Currently, WOW has upload speeds of 5 Mbps. But Schmidt said the company is looking to also increase those speeds in 2015.

“We have every intention of increasing the upload speeds,” Schmidt said.

Kris Adair, an owner of Wicked Broadband, said the upload speeds are an example of why the city needs to help Wicked with its pilot project, which would provide gigabit service to downtown, East Lawrence and a few other pockets in the city. She said the pilot project would spur the private investment needed to install the necessary fiber-optic cables that will make Lawrence competitive with Kansas City and other communities that have high-speed Internet.

WOW said it made the announcement of its new service now, in part, because it wanted city commissioners to have the information before considering Wicked’s proposal.

“WOW doesn’t agree with a government entity providing a loan guarantee to a private company,” Schmidt said. “Our position is we will provide the service that our customers want and need, but we will do so with our own equipment and our own dollars.”