The first launch was in the Twin Cities market in April of 2008. Since then, it’s been popping up all over America: Baltimore, Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, Seattle, Portland, Indiana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York.

Now, Washington, DC will also be benefiting from more robust bandwidth. In May, Cox deployed its Ultimate Internet service to residential and business customers in Northern Virginia. Today, Comcast announced that its Extreme 50 service will be launched in the DC Metro area. The service is first being offered in the Anacostia neighborhood, with the entire area expected to have wideband by year’s end. Most existing high-speed Internet customers will see their speeds double for no additional cost.

Now that cable is the broadband leader in Our Nation’s Capitol, you can look for continued wideband deployment by operators all over the country. Stay tuned!

Competition is the lifeblood of a successful and thriving marketplace, and the cable industry faces stiff competition across all the markets it serves. The consumer is the beneficiary, enjoying more choice, greater convenience and better value than ever before.

Other companies come out with new products and services and we do likewise. But it may be that Verizon is feeling the heat a bit. I’m assuming that’s why they felt the need last week to launch an attack on the cable industry’s new DOCSIS 3.0 specification, which enables wideband Internet access.

Last year, we tracked Comcast’s deployment of DOCSIS 3.0 in a number of markets. Last week, Charter Communications joined in with the launch of its Ultra60 service. Later that same day, on Verizon’s PolicyBlog, came this post: Behind Cable’s DOCSIS 3.0 Broadband Claims. Let’s break down Verizon’s arguments.

Verizon correctly note that DOCSIS 3.0 equipment employs channel bonding to deliver faster speeds (Comcast’s Extreme 50 offers 50 Mbps downstream; Charter’s Ultra60 is 60 Mbps), but also has the potential to deliver hundreds of megabits per second. Verizon leaves out the context that cable has been migrating towards an all-digital environment for years (Here is one typical post explaining the transition). They also assert that channels for use in DOCSIS 3.0 services will come exclusively by moving basic analog tier channels to digital. That is incorrect, since it ignores the use of switched digital video which allows cable operators to reclaim bandwidth in the digital tier.

Citing many analyses – yet linking only to a report prepared by the Fiber to the Home Council (hardly an unbiased source) – Verizon states that higher speeds on cable will decrease the customer experience and will require cable to upgrade.

In fact, the cable hybrid fiber-coax plant offers a great deal of capacity and flexibility in how nodes are combined to provide optimal service levels based on subscriber penetration and demand. But also unstated is the fact that FiOS also multiplexes (or combines the signals) to customers onto a shared trunk — they just do so in a different portion of their network.  In other words, even though the link to customers might be very fast, there is still a choke point where customers have to compete for bandwidth.  Too many customers trying to access the Internet at the same time can have the same effect on a FiOS network as it could on a DOCSIS network. Funnily enough, the blog post makes it sound as if Verizon doesn’t have to employ any network management at all!

Verizon makes a broad assumption regarding cable operator deployment plans for DOCSIS 3.0 services, somehow minimizing the technology because it is just now being deployed, and citing “indicators” that it won’t be deployed to all customers.

I’m not sure what tea leaves were used to make that assertion.

Comcast has been quite public in indicating it had DOCSIS 3.0 services in front of 10 million homes and businesses at the end of 2008 and plans to have it in front of all the homes and businesses it passes with plant capable of delivering 3.0 service in 2010. That’s just one cable operator out of the dozens that now have plant capable of running DOCSIS 3.0 services. Those operators pass more than 90% of residences in the United States. And DOCSIS 3.0 service has been operating quite successfully outside the US for some time now, with deployments in Japan and Singapore.

All of Verizon’s arguments ignore the huge capital expense that Verizon has made and continues to make to ultimately serve a portion (50%) of its footprint; specifically, Verizon is spending $23 billion to reach 13% of US households. In fact, they are still conspicuously avoiding neighborhoods and whole cities, as this Baltimore columnist notes. The rest of Verizon’s footprint will be relegated to DSL service, which is rapidly losing market share.

In contrast, cable’s investment to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 is modest.  And with the channel bonding that DOCSIS 3.0 permits, network speeds of 100 Mbps, 160 Mbps, and even higher will be possible.  In fact, a 750 MHz cable plant (90% of the country’s cable network miles) has a digital equivalent capacity of approximately 5 Gbps of bandwidth.

Bottom line: The cable industry feels good about the services we’re launching these days. Competition has been pretty good for us; take a look at the growth rates for cable’s phone service. I’ve seen Verizon representatives claim the company’s network is built for “decades to come” and is “future-proof.” We believe in continually getting bigger, better, faster. We believe in delivering more value over time.  I think this will be a good fight, and one that consumers will enjoy.

Those deployments will actually be expanded soon, reaching the city of Chicago, western and southern Chicago suburbs, northwestern Indiana, additional Atlanta communities, and the remainder of the Baltimore region in the first half of 2009.

All of this follow previous deployments earlier this year in the Twin Cities (April); Boston Metro and parts of southern New Hampshire, Philly Metro, and New Jersey (October); and Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Eugene (November).  If you’ve been reading this blog, you could have followed the progress here to here to here to here to… Well, here we are in December.

By the end of 2008, about 10 million homes and businesses will be able to sign up for wideband service. Customers can enter their zip codes at www.comcast.com/fastestfast to find out if they live in a serviceable area.

Here we go: Comcast launches DOCSIS 3.0 in Oregon and Southwest Washington, including such communities as Aberdeen, Spokane, Beaverton, and Eugene. The Extreme 50 tier offers download speeds of up to 50 Mbps. Comcast will also double speeds for the majority of existing high-speed Internet customers at no additional cost.

The company has a web page which allows you to check if wideband is available in your area or to sign up for e-mail updates when it is rolled out to you.

UPDATE: Media coverage.

• Comcast Rolls Wideband in the Pacific Northwest
• Comcast’s 50 Mbps service comes to OR, WA next month

In January, I wrote about Brian Roberts’ CES keynote, in which he talked about wideband.  In the spring, Comcast deployed DOCSIS 3.0 in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market. This week, Comcast deployed wideband service to residential homes and businesses in parts of New England, including the Boston Metropolitan region and Southern New Hampshire, as well as areas of Philadelphia and New Jersey. In addition to the new speed tiers, Comcast also is increasing speeds for most of its existing customers.

I walk though all this because many of the technology deployments we discuss on this blog are all part of a larger pattern. DOCSIS 3.0 uses channel bonding to join 6 MHz channels together to provide greater bandwidth. In order to free up channels to provide such services, cable operators have to manage their networks.That’s why you see analog channels moved to the digital tier, as I discussed again recently.

Comcast expects to reach more than 10 major markets and pass nearly 10 million homes and businesses in the next several months.

• Comcast Goes Wide With Wideband
• Comcast To Widen ‘Wideband’ To 10 Million Homes
• Comcast boosts speeds, holds prices: Twin Cities customers are the first in the nation to get the boost in high-speed Internet.
• Comcast Is Launching Its Wideband Modem Service
• Comcast broadens reach of DOCSIS 3.0, 50Mbps connections
• Comcast Takes ‘Wideband’ Wider
• Promoting tru2way TVs

A new article in CED Magazine (“DOCSIS 3.0 arrives“) takes a look at deployments by Videotron and Comcast.

After a year-long trial, [Canadian operator] Videotron is serving up two tiers of the wideband service with speeds of 30 Mbps and 50 Mbps. The slower “Ultimate Speed” costs $64.95 a month while the faster speed checks in at $79.95 a month.

Currently, Videotron’s Ultimate Speed services are available to 112,000 homes in Quebec, with the goal of offering the service to Videotron’s entire footprint of 933,000 homes by next year.

The article notes that, although Videotron didn’t need to do so, some operators may need to use Switched Digital Bandwidth to free up additional DOCSIS channels.

Comcast also picked a system where it wouldn’t need to clear room for more spectrum when it unveiled its first wideband deployment last month in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area with speeds of 50 Mbps on the downstream and 5 Mbps on the upstream.

The service is available to residential customers for $149.95 a month while small to medium-sized businesses can get the increased speeds for $199.95 a month.

Some operators are apparently planning on deployment in 2009.

Following that experience, the cable industry reached out to the consumer electronics industry. He said that they heard complaints that cable was a regional business that operated in silos, that cable set-top boxes are closed and proprietary, and that, in general, cable made it too tough to innovate and to create products and services that could be sold in the retail environment. This morning’s address seemed a valuable pay-off to those efforts, with Roberts describing cable as a real partner to consumer electronics and retail.

He went on to describe the latest stage of his company’s development: Comcast 3.0. As part of the new Comcast, he said they were committing to a series of issues:

• Having the best fiber optic networks and IP infrastructure
• Delivering superior experience in hi-def and interactive
• Providing new levels of excellence in customer service
• Being a leader in innovation by providing “products and services that are converged, plug-and-play, user-friendly, and most important, easily open for third-party innovation.”

Many in the cable industry have debated over whether content is king or distribution. Roberts said that today the answer is clear: The consumer is king. The best way to serve consumers is by offering a wide array of choice.

He went on to profile such new services as wideband, Fancast, Project Infinity, the AnyPlay portable DVR, and the SmartZone communications center. You can read about the details elsewhere, but the important feature was that Comcast was preparing to offer more video that could be consumed in a more flexible fashion, more bandwidth and more features on its communications services. In a word: more.

On May 8th of last year, during NCTA’s annual Cable Show (also held in Las Vegas), Roberts demoed a DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem capable of delivering 160 Mbps using its “channel bonding” technology. You can see a video of that demo here and, as a sign of how far we’ve come over the last decade, you can also see Roberts demo a high-speed cable modem in 1996. Look at how fast the photos download! Check out the White House website!