In Wednesday’s Q3 2016 earnings call with analysts, Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast, pointed out that in its business services sector in 2015 the company added about $280 million in revenue growth. For 2016, it projects it will come in at about the same level.
Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are still about 70 percent of Comcast’s customers in the business services arena and 60 percent of the growth, according to Smit. “But we’re seeing healthy growth from mid-size businesses right now and we’re getting a number of enterprise deals in,” he notes. “We’ve got a large financial institution with about 2,000 locations, a large health care provider with about 1,000 locations and a retail provider with about 2,000 locations. So we’re starting to see the enterprise side of the business grow.”
Reflecting some of that push, Comcast Business announced on Wednesday a multimillion dollar expansion of its fiber-based network across Montgomery County, Md., that’s capable of delivering up to 100 Gbps of network capacity. “These high-performance Ethernet services will help more than 5,800 local businesses, government agencies and hospitals stay competitive in this rapidly changing economy,” the company reports in a statement.
The expansion will include the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, the Interstate 270/Life Sciences and IT Corridor running through West Rockville, West Gaithersburg and Germantown as well as the downtown areas of Bethesda, Silver Spring, Takoma Park and Rockville.
“Network performance, reliability and scalability are important for nearly all types of businesses, but those organizations operating in the high-tech and biomedical industries are even more dependent on having fast and secure access to their data,” Byron Cantrall, regional VP at Comcast Business, says. “We’ve invested heavily in building an infrastructure that meets the high-speed, high-capacity needs of business, technology, healthcare and education customers across Maryland, and we look forward to continuing to launch new and innovative services that exceed their expectations well into the future.”
The Ethernet build-out will reportedly offer businesses with access to a portfolio of multi-Gigabit Ethernet options that will help meet the day-to-day demands of organizations requiring large amounts of bandwidth, looking to link multiple sites or branch locations or planning to connect their offices to a third-party data center.
“As the largest technology trade association in the state of Maryland, we provide our members with resources that help them reach their full potential as vital participants in their communities,” Marty Rosendale, senior executive advisor at Tech Council of Maryland, says. “Having access to fiber-based Ethernet services from Comcast Business will be tremendously helpful for these organizations by letting them take advantage of superior speeds and network performance so they can do their cutting-edge biomedical and technology research even better and more quickly than before.”
