The price of superfast broadband is dropping, at least for Comcast customers. The cable giant launched its 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0 "Extreme 50" service in Washington, DC and surrounding environs on Tuesday morning. At the same time, the price for the service nationwide is dropping from $139.95 to $99.95 for customers who subscribe to at least one other Comcast service (e.g., Digital Voice or cable TV).
It has been just over a year since Comcast flipped the switch on its first DOCSIS 3.0 deployment in the Twin Cities. Since then, the company has aggressively pushed out the gear into new areas with an eye towards covering 65 percent of its territory by the end of 2009.
Although the rollout has been proceeding apace, Ars wonders if consumers have been scared off by the $139 price tag. Breaking the $100 barrier is significant, but the Ultra (22Mbps), Performance Plus (16Mbps), and Performance tiers (12Mbps) are fast enough for many consumers. In today's tough economic climate, spending an additional $30-60 per month on broadband is something consumers are reluctant to do.
Ars asked Comcast about the reasons behind the price drop and whether it was due to slow adoption at $139 per month. The cable company says it has been in the cards all along. "We already have a bundled incentive with our other tiers, so this is similar," Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas told Ars. "It was just a matter of time before we introduced a bundled incentive price for Extreme 50."
With the drop to $99.95, Comcast now offers some of the cheapest 50Mbps broadband around (along with California ISP DSL Extreme). Cablevision holds the US speed title, having just started a New York deployment of a 101Mbps pipe priced at only $99 per month. Charter currently holds the US title for fastest broadband at 60Mbps, but that service is priced at $140 per month. Comcast's new pricing brings it in line with Cablevision on price, if not speed.
If the price drop has you tempted by the prospect of Internet service rated at 50Mbps, keep in mind that you'll seldom be able to truly saturate that bandwidth. Since you're sharing a finite pool of bandwidth with everyone else on your node, other bandwidth-hungry users can keep you from putting the pedal to the virtual metal. Of course, that applies to all tiers of cable Internet service—and DSL service isn't perfect either. But even if cable's shared architecture means that subscribers won't consistently get 50Mbps speeds, the speeds they do see can be surprisingly high.
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