Comcast prepping for national 100M rollout

Brian Santo

Comcast is on the verge of rolling out faster data speeds based on DOCSIS 3.0 technology across the country.

Plans include offering a 100 Mbps tier, twice the speed of the top tier offered by Verizon with its FiOS service. The company anticipates that the tier will appeal largely to business users.

Comcast first offered 100 Mbps data last year [1] with Minneapolis-St. Paul as its test market. In September, a Seattle paper quoted a Seattle Comcast spokesman saying that the city would be offering a similar service “by the end of [2009] or early [2010],” a statement that caused a bit of a kerfuffle with Comcast corporate [2].

That Comcast is rolling out faster D3 is therefore no surprise. The big secret is the timing. Most major Comcast headends are either already prepared to provide the service or could be prepared shortly.

The company plans to bond four downstream channels in all of its systems, many of which already have their DOCSIS 3.0 infrastructure in place, according to a Comcast employee with direct knowledge of the preparations.

The company has no immediate plans for upstream bonding.

More Broadband Direct 2/19/10:

• Comcast prepping for national 100M rollout [3]

• PPC to buy Evolution Broadband [4]

• Comcast teams with Mozy for online backup, storage [5]

• FCC: Tie broadband policy to national goals [6]

• Droid does: Phones work as remotes on FiOS TV [7]

• AT&T follows Verizon's lead with LTE centers [8]

• Incognito Software hires Kinnerk as product manager [9]

• TV stars to headline Battle of the Bands [10]

• Silicon Valley takes helm in wireless world [11]

• Report: Dropped calls more frequent in smartphones [12]

• Broadband Briefs for 02/19/10 [13]