Comcast preparing to one-up Verizon with 305 Mbps Internet package

Comcast is reportedly preparing to bolster their broadband Internet offering in an attempt to compete with high-speed rival Verizon Wireless. The cable company recently streamed a live event to employees that hinted at a faster service that would soon be available to customers that already have access to Verizon’s FiOS Internet package, according to reliable sources as reported byBroadband Reports.

Comcast’s boosted Xfinity Internet service would offer download speeds up to 305 Mbps which is conveniently just 5 Mbps more than Verizon’s fastest FiOS offering – certainly good PR for the cable company. There’s no information on pricing but we suspect it would be somewhere in the neighborhood of what Verizon charges if they want to be competitive, or somewhere around $200 per month.

It’s also unclear at this point when the service will be available or what the upstream speeds are. For what it’s worth, Verizon’s top tier package is rated at 65 Mbps upload. Broadband Reports notes that Comcast reached speeds between 75-100 Mbps during private testing last year.

Verizon announced speed increases to virtually all of their FiOS Internet packages in May but it was the top tier services that got the most attention. The company upgraded their fastest offering from 150/35 Mbps to 300/65 Mbps while their 50/20 Mbps plan was boosted to 150/65 Mbps.

Comcast’s current top Internet package is the Extreme 105 Xfinity, offering up 105 Mbps down to over 40 million homes across the country.

Comcast denies tiered plans, streaming to trump cable by 2016

As we reported about a week ago, ISPs seem poised to transition from an "unlimited" model to usage-based billing. Comcast claims it will not be one of them, although the company does impose a 250GB monthly cap.

According to Comcast's Chief Financial Officer, Michael Angelakis, metered plans could possibly hamper the company's growth as a broadband provider. "Our goal is to grow and share average revenue per user" he said. "We don't want to disrupt the consumer experience". The company's executives seem to acknowledge that the gap between their television and broadband subscribers is quickly shrinking.

Comcast lost 165,000 television subscribers last quarter but added over 261,000 broadband subscribers during the same time. Increasingly, those subscribers are opting in for higher-speed data packages and often times choose to bundle Internet with other services, like cable TV and phone services. Comcast sees this as an opportunity to upsell faster Internet.

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, thinks streaming video will outpace cable within 3-5 years. He told a group of analysts at the same conference in New York that streaming is, "all people are going to care about" in context to premium shows and movies found on the likes of HBO. "People are in love with broadband, in terms of click and watch". He continued to say that he considers HBO Go as his company's most fearsome competitor.

Although Netflix and Comcast seem to be in agreement on the important role the Internet will play in future media, Comcast still institutes a 250GB data cap. In fact, the cap has not budged since it was first deployed in 2008. The company claims its median broadband subscriber uses about 6-8GB of data per month which is well within the cap. However, if Hastings is right, bandwidth caps and tiered pricing pose a risk to his vision of the future where streaming video will usurp cable television for premium content.

Comcast quietly rolls out IPv6 to subscribers

Deployment of IPv6 is still in its infancy, but Comcast has started pushing the protocol out in a limited fashion to subscribers in select markets. That makes Comcast the first national ISP to deploy IPv6 and it is likely that others will follow suit in the near future.

IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, which aims to solve the long held apprehension that planet Earth will run out of available IP address space. Thanks to local network address translation (NAT) though, fears have been continually postponed. Because NAT allows homes and businesses to share a single Internet address amongst many devices, the number of unique IP addresses required for the world's population to access the web is far less than it would be otherwise. The newer protocol bumps up IPv4's limit of 4.2 billion unique address to 340 trillion trillion trillion, which ought to satiate the global hunger to be online for some time.

Comcast claims their IPv6 rollout will first appear exclusively on computers connected directly to their cable modems or gateways. Routers will not receive IPv6 addresses themselves, although I do wonder if users change the MAC hardware address on their router, if they will receive an updated IPv6 number -- router permitting, of course. The deployment is intentionally limited this way for incremental testing, at least until Comcast has the confidence to transition into its planned 2012 national rollout.

"Finally, it is worth noting that this is the start of pilot market deployments as opposed to full national deployment. As such, it is possible that this will not be without technical bugs in the near term. Our focus is in identifying any final IPv6 transition issues quickly and fixing them rapidly, so we can soon begin a national deployment." -- Jason Livingood, V.P. of Internet Systems at Comcast

The company is deploying what is called a "native dual stack". This will allow Comcast to support both IPv6 and IPv4 across their network without the overhead of tunneling or the performance hit of using network address translation. This method should also improve network compatibility with various services and devices over competing tunneling and NATing solutions. Comcast has also decided to stick with a prefix allocation that is /64 in length instead of /128 to maintain maximum compatibility. The draw back, of course, is that /64 limits the total number of addressable IPs to a mere 16 quintrillion.

Comcast has provided a list of supported, IPv6 compatible cable Internet hardware here.