Comcast on Tuesday said it is planning to launch DOCSIS 3.1-powered gigabit Internet service in five cities across the country in 2016.

The operator said the service will initially be available to residential and business customers in Atlanta and Nashville early in the year. The technology will become available to customers in Chicago, Detroit and Miami in the second half of the year, Comcast said.

Pricing details for the new service were not announced.

“We’re constantly working to ensure that our customers get the fastest speeds available, and that they get them first,” Comcast Central Division President Bill Connors said in a statement. “DOCSIS 3.1 represents a tremendous step forward in our commitment to keeping customers at the technology forefront. Combined with all the upgrades we have already put into our advanced fiber optic-coax network, this technology will not only provide more gigabit speed choices for customers, it will also eventually make these ultra-fast speeds available to the most homes in our service areas.”

Comcast said it already offers a 2 gigabit symmetrical service – dubbed Gigabit Pro – to 18 million homes across its national footprint. However, DOCSIS 3.1 is expected to ultimately help deliver downstream speeds of 10 gigabits per second and an upstream speed of at least 1 gigabit through the hybrid fiber-coax communications lines that have already been deployed.

The launch news follows the company’s December field trials of a DOCSIS 3.1 modem on its network in Philadelphia. At the time, the company said it believed the installation marked the first use of a DOCSIS 3.1 modem on a customer-facing network.

Tuesday’s announcement marks the company’s latest step toward actual deployment in an ambitious plan to push deployments throughout 2016 and cover its entire network footprint with DOCSIS 3.1 by 2018.

In mid-January, industry research and development facility CableLabs issued the first DOCSIS 3.1 certifications to five cable modem vendors, including Askey, Castlenet, Netgear, Technicolor and Ubee Interactive.

ABI Research recently forecast that nearly 9 million broadband subscribers will be on DOCSIS 3.1 equipment by next year.