Comcast has launched a superfast Internet service  in the Twin Cities -- with a hefty price tag. Billed as "wideband" by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, the new service offers download bandwidth speeds of 50 megabits per second, compared to current top speeds of 16 Mbps. And, Comcast says, the service can be revved up as high as 160 Mbps.
However, in the current version, the service offers upload speeds of just five Mbps, reflecting the inherent limits of cable Internet service.
A catch is that the monthly subscription fee is $150, compared to average fees of $50 a month for Comcast's regular Internet service. The new offering makes Comcast competitive with Verizon's FiOS network , which offer similar speeds at a similar price, company spokesperson Charlie Douglas said.
Intense Competition
At those prices, the service might appeal most to small businesses and high-volume movie downloaders. But such "comparatively meager" upload performance , together with the $150 monthly price tag, may dissuade small businesses from signing up, depending on the type of content the business provides, said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT , in an e-mail.
Both Comcast's and Verizon's high-speed offerings "reflect the results of growing, intense competition between cable and phone companies for entertainment dollars, and the approaching deadline for switching from analog to digital television-broadcast signals," King said. "It's likely to be a banner year for digital/HDTV sales, and Comcast is hoping to attract as many customers as possible before they're wooed away by Verizon and others."
By the end of the year, Comcast said, it will have deployed the "wideband" network to 20 percent of its customers.
The BitTorrent Factor
The rollout, just a week after Comcast agreed to stop interfering with users of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) system , suggests that the new technology could render moot the issue of bandwidth management -- at least on the high-speed network.
But that may be wishful thinking. At a congressional hearing in March, Haruka Saito, a member of the Japanese Embassy staff, said Japan, with 100Mbps deployments, also is running into congestion problems due to P2P usage.
Comcast's commitment to reach 20 percent of its market with the new technology coincides with its promise to adopt new network-management technology by the end of 2008. "We're committed to changing our network-management processes from what they are today by the end of the year, and we just need time to work that all out," Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas said. "We're going to work not just with BitTorrent, but a lot of other P2P companies, the Internet Engineering Task Force, academics and others to get together and come up with a better way to manage the network." (continued...)
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