Comcast’s DOCSIS 3.0-based Extreme 105 tier made its official debut today, with the service now available to 40 million homes across the cable operator’s footprint.
Comcast started rolling out its residential Extreme 105 tier last year via a soft launch, but now it’s available in major markets across the nation, including San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and the majority of Boston, among others. Comcast previously launched its 100 Mbps business class tier in most of the same markets.
“This speed tier continues to expand our portfolio of Internet service offerings and takes them up to a whole new level,” said Cathy Avgiris, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of communications and data services. “With it, we’re powering the digital home of the future, where entire families using multiple devices – laptops, gaming consoles, tablets, smartphones – can all take advantage of high-bandwidth applications simultaneously, ensuring they each have a great online experience.”
Pricing-wise, Comcast is doing its best to lure customers over to Extreme 105. The wideband service, which features upstream speeds of up to 10 Mbps, is available to Comcast’s triple-play customers for the introductory rate of $105 per month for 12 months, which is just barley more than Comcast’s fee of $99.95 per month for its Extreme 50 service.
Comcast subscribers also need to pay a $250 installation fee for Extreme 105.
For the business-class 100 Mbps service, Comcast has previously said it was using cable modem termination systems from Arris and customer premises equipment from SMC Networks for its tier that bonds four downstream channels.
Last year, Comcast said customers would need to use Arris’ WBM760 cable modem for Extreme 105.
Comcast is including a home networking gateway with Extreme 105 that will enable Wi-Fi access throughout a subscriber’s house.
With the increased speed, Comcast subscribers can now download a 4 GB HD movie in 5 minutes, versus the hour-and-a-half time frame from a 6 Mbps tier.
With the launch, Comcast is laying claim to having the fastest residential data service to the most homes in the United States, but Suddenlink’s Max 107.0 service is still the fastest. Currently, Videotron holds the DOCSIS 3.0 top speed in North America with its 120 Mbps service that was rolled out in September.
On the telco front, Verizon launched its 150 Mbps down, 35 Mbps up service in November.
