Cable operator Comcast has begun offering 50 Mbps broadband Internet service in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, and says it plans to introduce the new high-speed offering throughout its entire service area by the year 2010. Comcast is pricing the new service at $149.99 per month for residential service, which is roughly triple the price of Comcast’s previous highest-bandwidth offering. Business customers will pay $199.95 a month. Although the new service offers download speeds of up to 50 Mbps, uploads on the service are capped at a comparatively slow 5 Mbps
"This announcement marks the beginning of the evolution from broadband to wideband," said Comcast senior VP and high-speed Internet general manager Mitch Bowling, in a statement. "Wideband is the future and it’s coming fast. We believe wideband will usher in a new era of speed and Internet innovation for today’s digital consumers."
The new offering is based on Comcast’s deployment of Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) 3.0 technology on its cable networks. Comcast says DOCSIS 3.0 will enable it to offer customers bandwidth up to 100 Mbps over it fiber network over the next two years, with support for future speeds of 160 Mbps.
Comcast’s 50 Mbps offering helps the company compete against fiber-based solutions like Verizon’s FiOS and AT&T’s U-Verse, and describes its offering as price-competitive with those services. Comcast estimates the 50 Mbps offering will be available to about 20 percent of its customer base by the end of 2008. The company plainly hopes that the availability of high-bandwidth connectivity will create new revenue streams in video and media downloading: with a 50 Mbps downstream link; renting or buying a high-definition video for download becomes a much more practical matter.
Comcast has recently taken heat from public policy groups and the FCC for deliberately blocking selected peer-to-peer file sharing traffic in the name of "network management." The company has since said it will cease blocking P2P traffic, and plans to work with BitTorrent and other P2P companies on ways to better manage mammoth amounts of data.
