The Twin Cities is the first market in the nation to enjoy Comcast’s newest high speed offering: 100 megabit per second business class service, leveraging their investment in DOCSIS 3.0, a cable internet standard. Their new service offering delivers up to 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) downloads and up to 15 Mbps uploads for $369.95 per month.
If you haven’t heard of DOCSIS 3.0 (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification which is explained in this video) and don’t know why this is important, it’s the next generation of cable standards for delivering data over cable with theoretical speeds between 170mbps and 340mbps download with upload speeds of 120mbps.
Not only is Comcast’s new offering significantly faster than what a telecom company offers (e.g., a T1 line speed is 1.544Mbps upload and download speed), it is also substantially cheaper than a T1 usually offered at $500 or more. Even three T1’s, combined in a T3 offering, is only 43Mbps and can run in to the multiple $1,000’s per month. Once this new speed tier hits other major markets, the telecom companies will have a hard time winning the race for broadband internet connections in the SMB space.
Comcast clearly sees the market need in small to midsize businesses (SMB) due to the acceleration in cloud computing and SMB adoption, VoIP services, online storage backup and other bandwidth hungry uses. Having an affordable high speed option is an SMB imperative and I’m really pleased to see Comcast rolling this out in the Twin Cities first.