Comcast Launches DOCSIS 3.0 Broadband Battle Against…Qwest?

Doug Williams | April 03, 2008, 12:49 PM

The folks over at Light Reading report that Comcast has launched its first DOCSIS 3.0 wideband service in Minneapolis/St. Paul. While capable of eventually achieving 160 Mbps download speeds, the wideband service is being launched with a cap of 50 Mbps shared downstream bandwidth and 5 Mbps upstream.

According to Mitch Bowling, Sr. VP of Comcast’s high-speed Internet division, the roll-out of wideband service in Minneapolis “had nothing to do about competition at all.”

That’s an understatement. Rather than tackle Verizon's super-fast FiOS service head-on in one of the many overlapping markets the two companies share, Comcast’s first bout will be against Qwest, in a market where Comcast already offers the faster broadband service (12-16 Mbps with PowerBoost, vs. 5 to 7 Mbps from Qwest). It is a cautious approach, and not altogether surprising, since it is nice to work out the kinks of any beta-type test before going prime-time. Comcast is targeting 20 percent of its footprint for DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades by year-end, so it probably won’t be ducking Verizon for long.

Underscoring the “not about competition” position is the fact that this consumer-grade service carries a luxury price tag of $149.99 per month, more than triple its current $42.95 per month non-bundled cable modem offer. Our research confirms that a reasonably large segment of consumers are interested in paying for faster broadband connection speeds, but adding $100+ to the monthly broadband budget in a tedious economy is likely way beyond the pain point for the vast majority of households. I suspect Comcast may need to do some behind-the-scenes discounting in order to achieve meaningful penetration levels for the market test.