US: Comcast Ultra-fast Internet by 2016

In a blog Comcast announced plans to offer US Internet speeds of up to 2 gigabits per second to the majority of its nearly 22 million subscribers by the end of the year. That’s about twice as fast as the ultra-high-speed service Google is now offering in three US cities, and 80 times as fast as Comcast’s standard broadband Internet plan.
“We’ll first offer this service in Atlanta and roll it out in additional cities soon with the goal to have it available across the country and available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year,” the blog post says.
Most remaining customers who aren’t able to take advantage of the two-gigabit service will eventually be offered Google-like one-gigabit speeds over traditional coaxial cable, according to the post.
Google began rolling out its one-gigabit fiber service more than two years ago, saying it wanted to push other ISPs into offering faster internet speeds. And this is now happening, at least on some level. For Google and others, the hope is that faster speeds will not only improve the performance of today’s Internet application, from Facebook to Netflix, but also engender a whole new wave of more advanced online applications.
The rub is that Comcast’s offer may not result in widespread use of high-speed fiber. It must still lay fiber to individual homes, and customers may be asked to incur the cost, which something they may not be willing to do.
Comcast hasn’t discussed pricing for its new service. The company’s XFINITY Extreme 505 service costs $399.95 per month and offers speeds of about half a gigabit. However, competition from Google Fiber, which is planned to expand into Atlanta, may drive down prices in some areas. We’ve already seen this from AT&T, which offers gigabit fiber connections for $70 a month in Austin, Texas, where it competes with Google Fiber, but $110 in Cupertino, where it doesn’t.
The real sticking point may the setup costs. Comcast already has fiber optic pipe running through much of the country, but providing links from these pipes into people’s homes, so-called “last mile” connections, could be an expensive process. Google has largely defrayed these costs by focusing on rolling out the service one neighborhood at a time to areas in which many people have signed up in advance.
If Comcast is successful, it could be the first nationwide gigabit capable residential Internet provider. Google Fiber has been expanding into more cities but is still, at present, only available in three metro areas, and is only available in select neighborhoods in those cities.
Wired: http://ow.ly/LnQcA