Comcast punches up Net access, but it comes at a price

Comcast, the No. 1 residential broadband service provider, Thursday will give residents of Minneapolis and St. Paul the first opportunity to check out a speedy Internet service that CEO Brian Roberts calls "cable's next big thing."
The service, informally called wideband, can transmit a high-definition movie in about 10 minutes. It would take about 40 minutes to do that on Comcast's most popular Internet service and more than an hour on most cable systems.

"An extreme gamer who wants the lowest (delay) that's available would find it interesting," says Mitch Bowling, Comcast's high-speed Internet general manager. "Also, we are deploying this to our business services customers. There are a lot of uses for it there."

The speed comes with a steep price: nearly $150 a month for residential users and $200 for business customers, who get additional software and services.

But Comcast plans an ambitious rollout at a time when subscriber growth in its lucrative Internet business is slowing, and rivals led by Verizon are making inroads. "Comcast, for better or worse, is in an arms race with Verizon and has to keep pace with the speeds it's offering," says Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. That could be significant, because "Cable operators generally move as a pack," he says.

Comcast, which has 13.2 million Internet customers, plans to offer wideband to 20% of the 49 million homes in its service areas this year and 100% by the middle of 2010, Bowling says.