Hot on the heels of Qwest’s upgrade last week, Comcast is upgrading too. Here’s the news:
Comcast is debuting 100-Mbps Internet service for businesses in Minneapolis/St. Paul, an opening salvo in one of its most aggressive attacks on telephone companies’ commercial services.
The DOCSIS 3.0-based service, priced at $369.95 per month, is “highly competitively priced” compared with typical telco business-class T-1 lines, according to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas. The cable operator is initially offering the 100-Mbps tier to commercial customers–rather than residential subscribers–“because we think this kind of speed will be of more interest to them,” he added.
That’s great for us in the Twin Cities!
But what about rural areas? Fred Pilot pointed out after my Qwest post that the big providers are willing to upgrade their current footprints but that interest in new areas is small. How can we encourage the big providers to go into new areas? What do improvements in metro areas mean to rural areas? Is it a tide that will raise all boats?
Blandin on Broadband 
Unfortunately, in rural areas, the economics of deploying broadband are radically different. Local loops are much longer making the rates delivered with DSL much lower. Wireless is a pretty good match to the challenges of rural broadband, but by far not the only choice.
Cable companies are ill suited to covering rural areas. Phone companies generally don’t see much profit in it. Nothing new here, history repeats itself.
Note the Comcast upstream speed is 15Mbps, with the usual “up to” caveat. I’m glad Comcast is offering higher downstream speeds – some undoubtedly will take advantage. But the costs are extreme and should remind us that as long as we depend on companies like Comcast to build essential infrastructure, we will lose our competitive edge to the countries that make such infrastructure a priority.