Comcast Offers Internet For $150 A Month
Telecommunications giant Comcast Corporation unveiled a super-speedy Internet service that it says is aimed at residential and business customers With a price tag of $149.99 per month, compared to the $50 it offers for regular cable Internet, it’s likely to attract very little interest in this bumbling economy.
Still, Comcast is hoping its new Wideband Internet service, with initial download speeds offered at or above 50 megabytes per second (Mbps) increasing to 160 Mbps by mid-2009. Initial upload speeds will be 5 Mbps when Wideband unrolls to 20 percent of homes currently using basic Comcast broadband Internet. Comcast plans to offer Wideband in 100 percent of its coverage area by mid-2010.
Comcast is able to offer Wideband thanks in part to the shutoff of analog television signals in 2009. Comcast, along with other cable companies, is starting to shut down its analog cable packages, offering digital-only tiers instead. There is no federal mandate for analog cable shutoff, but more cable companies are going digital-only, citing an increase in picture and audio quality. Comcast is able to offer Wideband internet speeds by hijacking the bandwidth normally used for three analog channels, a practice known as “channel bonding“; currently, all customers connect to one unused channel.
Who would be interested in paying $150 for super-fast Internet? “An extreme gamer who wants the lowest (delay) that’s available would find it interesting,” Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s high-speed Internet general manager, told USA Today. Movie buffs would also benefit from Wideband, with an estimated wait time of just 10 minutes to download a high definition movie (compared to three hours through DSL). “Also, we are deploying this to our business services customers. There are a lot of uses for it there.” Business customers would pay $200 per month instead of the $149.99 offered to residential customers because of additional software and services needed to run Comcast’s Wideband Internet on a business platform.
Comcast will face a rival in the Wideband Internet world: Verizon’s FiOS currently offers download speeds of 50 Mbps and upload speeds around 20 Mbps for a monthly price of $140. While Comcast enjoys a larger coverage area than Verizon FiOS, competition will still be rough—Comcast has come under scrutiny in the past few months for throttling Internet speeds for BitTorrent seeders, crippling the spread of peer-to-peer files including such as movies, music and computer programs.
And Verizon looks unphased. “We don’t see a market for (100 Mbps) today, but our network’s capable of that now,” says Verizon FiOS spokeswoman Bobbi Henson. Currently, Verizon is offered in 32 percent of the areas covered by Comcast, which could give Comcast a leg-up in this race for high-speed Internet.
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