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Comcast mulls ultrafast Net access- 100-megabit-per-second broadband service that would be 60 times faster than today’s cable modems.

Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable television company and the leading provider of high-speed Internet access in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, yesterday said it is taking a serious look at rolling out 100-megabit-per-second broadband service that would be 60 times faster than today’s cable modems.

By Peter J. Howe, Boston Globe Staff

Speaking at the National Cable & Telecommunications Association annual meeting here, Comcast chief executive Brian L. Roberts said he sees ”100 megabits as a real viable prospect in the not-many-many-year future.

”We have to now plan for how to make it better, even faster,” Roberts said. ”We’re at the beginning of broadband. Twenty percent may have the service. That means 80 percent don’t.”

Given that Comcast is now serving more than 4 million broadband subscribers nationally on the bandwidth allocated to one television channel, Roberts said, ”We’re not even stretching the rubber band at all.”

Just who would need a 100-megabit home Internet connection — and what customers would do with it — is a huge question, given that 60 percent of current dial-up customers aren’t even considering switching to broadband because they see no compelling advantage, according to a national survey by Horowitz Associates, a Larchmont, N.Y., cable consulting firm.

Broadband connections such as cable modems and telephone digital subcriber lines, which 19 million US households now have, typically offer Net access at speeds 30 to 50 times faster than dial-up modems.

Comcast currently offers 3-megabit connections to businesses, and RCN Corp. last winter began offering a similar service to residential customers in Boston and the 14 suburbs it serves. Comcast offers its residential customers 1.5-megabit cable modem service.

Three large phone companies, Verizon Communications, SBC Communications, and BellSouth, last month issued a set of network equipment standards they said they would use to begin offering multi-megabit fiber-optic connections to homes as soon as next year, possibly as a way to offer video service as well as high-speed data.

Comcast spokesman Tim Fitzpatrick said the Philadelphia-based company, which has 21 million cable subscribers and networks reaching 39 million US homes, is not yet committing to any schedule for upgrading to 100-megabit connections.

But, Fitzpatrick said, ”We think it’s probably the direction everybody’s headed in. Things are getting faster and faster all the time. Increases of that nature are just going to be inevitable as everything else speeds up.”

Some leading providers of broadband Internet content say the value of 100-megabit home connections can be imagined today. Jim Ramo, chief executive of Movielink, an online movie rental service backed by five big studios, said: ”More channel capacity would be something very helpful the cable industry could do for us.”

Ramo said it now would take up to 10 hours for a subscriber to download a high-definition version of a feature movie through a broadband connection operating at 750 kilobits per second. That would be reduced to minutes with 100-megabit links, he said. ”Movies suck a lot of bits,” Ramo said. ”If you’ve got more bandwidth, bring it on.”

Bob Visse, director of MSN portal marketing for Microsoft Corp., said a new broadband version of MSN will allow people to play a video game together while communicating through Web cams and instant messaging, which would require abundant, fast Internet connections.

”We’re always going to eat up as much bandwidth as will be out there,” Visse said.

Peter J. Howe can be reached at [email protected].

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/161/business/Comcast_mulls_ultrafast_Net_access+.shtml

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