I was a young guy fresh out of the Marine Corps when I landed a job in my wife’s hometown of Atlanta as an installer with a cable company that soon became part of Comcast. It was 1999, and America’s life-changing appetite for faster and faster internet speeds was only beginning.
Consumers were discarding their original dial-up internet connections (delivered over creaky conventional phone lines) for much faster digital broadband connections. Along with the rest of the world, I was learning that faster broadband speeds were the gateway to more and better online services. Fast forward more than 20 years and network innovation continues to blaze a path for faster speeds and greater access to connectivity.
Across our footprint in Washington, we now offer ultra-fast speeds of up to 1.2 Gbps to all Xfinity customers. The speeds we offer today provide more than enough capacity to handle the internet needs of almost any household in the state. From downloading movies to high-speed web browsing, interactive schoolwork, videoconferencing, or posting on social media, even if everyone in the family is online at the same time.
Yet we also know that people are consuming more online content, not less. Applications like streaming – especially Thursday night football – 4K gaming, virtual reality, and videoconferencing are driving massive usage on our network. Nearly a billion devices connected to our network last year. That’s 12 times the amount in 2018. Internet networks must handle our ultra-connected lives today and tomorrow.
That is why Comcast is significantly expanding and evolving the availability of our Xfinity 10G Network across Washington state this year. Once complete, these homes and businesses will have the foundational next-generation network to introduce new multi-gigabit Internet options. We’re building our network to meet our customer needs today and in anticipation of a future of ever-increasing demand.
10G Explained
If you haven’t already, you’ll hear much talk about 10G, multi-gig internet, and Gigabits per second, also referenced as Gbps. A one Gbps connection moves content at the speed of one gigabit per second, the equivalent of 1,000 megabits per second (Mbps). To put that into perspective, the first “high-speed” home broadband system I installed in 1999 had a speed of 1.5 megabits per second. And that was enough to earn bragging rights for the fastest internet connection in the neighborhood.
10G refers to a network technology platform established by the cable industry association and technical standards group (NCTA, SCTE). This platform is the foundation of our network, which is now delivering next-generation broadband in Washington with faster speeds, greater reliability, lower latency, greater capacity, and enhanced performance. And this technology platform will help us provide multi-gig symmetrical speeds, including 10 Gigabit speeds in the future.
Comcast has been a leader in developing and deploying these innovative 10G building blocks within our network. Because of this momentum and work, we recently announced the Xfinity 10G Network to recognize the work that we’ve done and to signify where we are going in the future.
Multi-Gig Internet Deployment
The first phase of network enhancements is happening now and will initially offer a maximum download speed of 2 Gbps, combined with upload speeds up to 200 Mbps, five to 10 times faster than Comcast’s existing upload speeds. We expect that nearly half of our network in Washington state will offer multi-gig Internet speeds by the end of 2023.
This massive expansion project will be largely invisible to the public because one significant advantage of our Hybrid-Fiber Coaxial (HFC) network architecture is that we can quickly and continuously evolve our customers’ connections with minimal disruption. Our approach is the smartest, most efficient way to deliver next-generation speeds to the greatest number of people in the shortest time because we don’t need to dig up entire neighborhoods and yards in Washington.
This will all happen in stages over the next several years. The end goal is to offer every Xfinity customer in Washington multigigabit symmetrical speeds over the connections already installed in their homes. And for applications like gaming, virtual reality, and videoconferencing, where lower latency is increasingly essential, we will unveil new low latency features later this year that will enable an even better experience than they have today.
Looking five to ten years into the future, we are confident that our Xfinity 10G network will continue to pay off. The proliferation of internet-connected devices in our homes and cars will push the need for speed, both upload and download. Of course, only some of us will need something close to a super-fast 10G connection. People will move into the internet future at their own pace. When they do arrive, though, we want our network to be ready and waiting for them.
