Tech - Comcast Offering 50 Mbps in Next-Generation Network

Barry Levine


With broadband Internet access encompassing much of the country, Comcast announced Monday that it is joining a trend to wideband. The company said it will launch its next-generation DOCSIS 3.0 network in Oregon and southwest Washington with download speeds up to 50 megabits per second.

The service will be made available next month for homes and businesses. The company said the new wideband service's Extreme 50 tier will offer the 50 Mbps speed, and that, with the new system, the majority of existing high-speed Internet customers will have their regular access speeds doubled at no additional cost.

Someday, More Than 160 Mbps

Customers currently in the company's Performance Plus tier will be upgraded to double their download speeds to up to 16 Mbps and their upload speeds to as much as two Mbps.

Curt Henninger, senior vice president of Comcast for that region, said that even these blazing speeds "are only a preview of what's to come." In the future, he said, the company will have the capability to deliver speeds in excess of 160 Mbps.

Residences will be offered two new premium speed tiers. Extreme 50, with 50 Mbps down and up to 10 Mbps upstream, will be available at $139.95 per month. The other tier, called Ultra, will provide 22 Mbps downstream and up to five Mbps upstream for $62.95 monthly.

Comcast said in the Extreme 50 tier, customers can download a 6GB high-definition full-length movie in about 16 minutes, a standard-definition movie of about 2GB in about five minutes, and a standard-definition TV show of about 300MB in seconds.

The new business-class tiers will include the Deluxe 50 Mbps downstream/10 Mbps upstream service for $189.95. Customers in this tier also are offered a variety of added features and support, such as corporate-class e-mail, calendar, document sharing, firewall protection, static IP addresses, multiple e-mail addresses, and 24/7 business-class support.

In addition, a new Premium Tier will be offered, with 22 Mbps/five Mbps at $99.95 monthly. Customers already in the business class will receive speed increases at no additional cost.

Comcast and the FCC

Comcast's move to wideband service comes in the wake of months of wrangling between the company and the Federal Communications Commission over how it allocated bandwidth to heavy users.

The company came under fire because it targeted users of peer-to-peer file sharing without notification and without posting a policy. The FCC required that Comcast submit a plan for broadband management, and the company eventually came up with a new congestion-management plan that slows speeds for the heaviest users when traffic congestion is greatest.

With huge increases in bandwidth for its new services, Comcast obviously will now have bigger lanes of traffic for its customers. But, like a closet that always gets crowded no matter how big it is, more bandwidth may well translate into more uses for bandwidth.