| MIKE WENDLAND: Lightning-fast connection comes at thunderous price
February 20, 2005
You may be surprised, then, to learn that among the most popular services being offered by Comcast Corp., Michigan's biggest broadband provider, is an even higher speed cable option that costs $95 a month. In fact, it's become a sort of status symbol for what Comcast calls early adopters. You and I would probably just call them geeks. Comcast Pro, as the service is called, delivers Internet access at speeds ranging between two and three times that offered by DSL or regular cable Internet. owners or telecommuters. And that has indeed happened, says Comcast vice president Bill Black, with business people using the service because DSL wasn't available or they had large files to send and receive. "The amazing thing, though, is that a lot of our new Pro customers say they just want it for the speed of surfing," says Black. "We're seeing a lot of referrals from existing Pro customers, and others who say they saw it at someone else's home." Comcast won't release numbers on how many of their 200,000 Internet subscribers in southeastern Michigan have opted for the pro service. We'll probably get an idea, though, when Comcast releases its financial report for the first quarter in May. But Black says next to high-definition cable TV, Comcast Pro is the company's hottest product. Aaron King, who lives in one of the new subdivisions out in Macomb Township, gladly pays the $95 monthly fee to surf from home at the high speeds he says he is used to on the computers at his workplace. "I was basically happy with the regular service and thought I'd just try it out," says King, a hardware designer for a new company that does Web applications. "But there's no way I'd go back. It's that fast." How fast? You can download Web pages and files at 3.5 Mbps with Comcast Pro and upload them at 384 Kbps. Regular cable Internet has speeds capped at 1.5 Mpbs for downloading and 128 Kbps for uploading. What does that mean? A file that takes eight minutes to download over a 56Kbps dial-in modem connection would take about 12 seconds to download on regular cable broadband and just four seconds on Comcast Pro. For those who use the Internet to play Xbox Live and other video game services with users all over the world, the higher speeds are particularly welcome. I'm not a gamer, but I signed up for the service at my home in early December, figuring I'd try it for a month or so and then write a review and switch back to the basic Internet package. Just looking at the speed stats doesn't really give you an idea how blazingly fast Comcast Pro really is. Web pages pop on screen immediately. I can send pictures, update Web pages and download files and pictures from news sources at speeds that seem to me to be every bit as fast as on the T1 connection downtown at my Free Press office. It's going to be hard to go back. But $95 a month is also pretty hard to justify. With my Comcast cable TV services added on, that's about $150 a month for cable. I'm hooked on high-speed Internet access, but not those high prices. Maybe I'll just keep it just for one more month.
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