10.08
Higher speeds, sometime between now and forever henceforth
Another bit of Comcast news: they’ll raise speed tiers while keeping pricing constant when they roll out new DOCSIS 3.0 technology sometime between the end of this year and the end of 2010. The problem is that in Colorado Qwest is offering them no real competitive reason to perform a system upgrade. As such, Colorado will likely have to wait a few years for network upgrades to come to the area, especially in light of Qwest’s conservative schedule on deployment of already last-gen technology (ADSL2+, see my previous article on this subject) to 1.5-2 million homes, less if they decide that the economy isn’t faring well enough.
But when Comcast does upgrade their network, nearly everyone’s internet speeds will increase. Preliminary reports say that the “performance” internet tier will double in speed, from six megabits per second of download speed and one megabit of upload speed to twelve and two megabits, respectively. The Performance Plus tier, priced at $8-$10 above “Performance” and currently offering 8 Mbit/s on downloads and 2 Mbit/s on uploads, will be upped to 22 and 5 Mbps, attempting to compete with Verizon’s slightly cheaper, slightly slower (20 Mbit/s on downloads instead of 22) FiOS option where it is available. Last but not least, Comcast will introduce a new 50 Mbps tier that will cost $140-$150 and offer 5-10 Mbps of upload speed, depending on who you ask.