TV Providers Speed Internet Access Race

In a mere three weeks, two major TV bundle providers, AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. have introduced new, higher speed Internet services in a quickening race to land triple-play customers seeking better performance and support for video-driven applications.

Earlier this week, cable colossus Comcast debuted Blast, a 16mbps downstream 2mbps upstream Internet access service to customers in parts of the San Francisco Bay area. It described the offering as “an automatic upgrade” to users of its previous highest-speed 8mbps downstream service.

The news comes roughly three weeks after AT&T announced a faster Internet service of its own for customers of its IPTV-driven U-verse triple-play bundle. AT&T Yahoo High Speed Internet Max is available now and supports downstream speeds of a maximum of 10mbps and an upstream speed of up to 1.5mbps.

“This is clearly a case of keeping ahead of the competition, which in this case is U-verse,” said Teresa Mastrangelo, principal analyst with BroadbandTrends.com. “Offering the higher bandwidth certainly makes the customer happy and likely to think twice about switching service providers. I expect we will continue to see cable operators up the bandwidth in markets with strong broadband and video competition, but the rest of the markets will likely remain untouched.”

As Mastrangelo and others have inferred, it’s competition, and not the customer, that drives advances.

The Comcast and AT&T offerings pale in comparison to a Verizon Communications Inc. service initially launched last October in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Verizon’s entry is both faster, 20mbps, and symmetric, which means the downstream and upstream speed are the same. Its 20/20 offering is available with its FiOS triple-play bundle.

Comcast is also targeting Atlantic states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware and Virginia, according to a company spokesman.

High-speed symmetric services are better equipped for such increasingly popular applications as gaming, which aren’t delay-tolerant. And the faster you can upload video and other bandwidth-demanding content, the better.

In the ever intensifying battle between entrenched cablecos and newer video entrant telcos for triple-play bundle customers, very high-speed Internet access is fast-becoming a powerful weapon. 

According to Verizon, a 20mbps upstream broadband connection would allow a customer to upload a 250MB file of 200 photos in about 90 seconds, compared with about 47 minutes over a 768kbps upstream link.

A 500MB file could be uploaded in less than four minutes over the 20mbps link, while a 3GB file, such as a long family video, could be uploaded in about 20 minutes, said the telco.

Verizon is not alone in offering high-speed symmetric Internet access as far smaller SureWest Communications, which serves customers in Northern California, also entered the fray last year with a 20/20mbps service.

For speed fiends, SureWest offers a 50/50mbps Internet access service, but it’s part of a high-end triple-play bundles that costs several hundred dollars a month.

While those offering symmetric services typically do so over fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks, asymmetric services such as those of AT&T and Comcast are most often provided over hybrid networks with either copper or coax reaching the residence.

Cablecos are betting heavily on DOCSIS 3.0 channel bonding technology to help them ramp up network bandwidth this year. The CableLabs specification lays out a downstream maximum of 160mbps and an upstream maximum of 120mbps.

Comcast plans to pass up to 20 percent of subscriber homes by yearend, said company executives at the Consumer Electronics Show last month. At the same event, Cisco Systems Inc.’s Scientific Atlanta unit, a huge cableco equipment provider, demonstrated a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem.

AT&T Inc. www.att.com
BroadbandTrends www.broadbandtrends.com
CableLabs Inc. www.cablelabs.com
Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com
Comcast Corp. www.comcast.com
SureWest Communications www.surewest.com
Verizon Communications Inc. www.verizon.com

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