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Comcast Plans to Upgrade; Verizon Will Debut Fiber Optics

Posted on: Tuesday, 8 February 2005, 00:00 CST

Feb. 7--Area competition among broadband Internet service providers became more interesting last month when Verizon Communications announced plans for a faster broadband product and Comcast Corp. increased the speed of its broadband product here.

Verizon announced Jan. 19 that Fort Wayne would become its first Midwest market to get its new fiber-optic systems, known as FIOS. Comcast increased the speed of its broadband product here the next week. The companies said last week the timing of the announcement and upgrade were not influenced by competitive considerations.

"Absolutely not," said Jane Howard, spokeswoman for Verizon's northeast Indiana operations. "We had known Fort Wayne had been chosen back in December, but hadn't been able to get enough of that information firmed up." In Comcast's case, the broadband product upgrade in Fort Wayne "was planned prior to the Verizon announcement," said Mark Apple, corporate affairs director for Comcast Cablevision of Indianapolis. "All of our Indiana properties went on that same day last week." The Comcast upgrade "is being rolled out across the country, but not everyone is getting it at the same time. Fort Wayne was among the first systems to get the speed increase," he said.

Fort Wayne's dominant provider of local phone service offers a DSL Internet service here, Verizon Online, with an entry-level product featuring download speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second and upload speeds of up to 384 kilobits per second.

Comcast High Speed Internet customers started the year with a download speed of 3 megabits per second and upload speed of 256 kilobits per second on its entry-level service.

For comparison, a 4 megabyte video clip file would take 12.8 minutes to download with a dial-up connection of 56 kilobits per second, 25 seconds with Verizon's 1.5 megabits per second DSL connection and 12 seconds with Comcast's 3 megabits per second connection.

Last month, Verizon announced plans to start building a fiber-to-the-premises network here during the first quarter. The network would cost between $65 million and $75 million and would reach 65,000 homes and businesses within two years.

Its entry-level broadband product will come with a download speed of 5 megabits per second and upload speed of 2 megabits per second.

The next week, the download speed of Comcast's entry-level broadband product here rose to 4 megabits per second, and its upload speed rose to 384 kilobits per second.

"The fiber network we have in place right now is the network we will continue to use for the future," Apple said. "It can be upgraded, but there's no reason for us to do that. We don't think that fiber-to-the-premises gives any clear advantage; we think that it's an unnecessary capital expense.""We like to say that it's not just the speed, but what you can do with it. And we plan to offer applications that will be exclusive to our customers; some already are available, in the form of video mail.

"We think we're in a pretty good position to compete with Verizon already; they're just getting around to what we've been doing for six years now," he said. "They have to come in and do this rebuild. They're trying to catch up with us." Verizon executives said they expect the competition to be good for area Internet users.

Indiana Data Center also sells for 30 locations in Fort Wayne a wireless broadband service with a download speed of 1.5 megabits per second. It charges $24.95 monthly for the service, compared with $29.95 for Verizon Online with a one-year commitment and $42.95 for Comcast High Speed Internet, when packaged with a cable television subscription.

"We've been trying to bring the cost of broadband down and (encourage) higher connectivity from our inception," said Stan Adams, Indiana Data Center owner.

The company gets 20 percent of its revenue from other business, such as server backup and co-location services. And it projects that type of business eventually will account for 90 percent of its revenue.

Adams expects the development of that business to accelerate in two years, after Verizon has its fiber-to-premises network built.

"We're getting a lot of demand for backup service," he said. But, "unless I've got a good-size pipe between you and me, it's hard to back up your servers.""Our business model really is for backup services, disaster recovery, co-location, hosting and all of these are enhanced by bigger, larger bandwidth. That really is our business model. Our whole thing is to just keep making (bandwidth) cheaper and cheaper." Some high-tech businesses in the community say the proliferation of affordable broadband here and Verizon's contribution to that will boost economic development.

"It's a huge step," said Karen Goldner, director of special projects at Fourth Wave, a holding company for high-tech businesses.

"It really does raise Fort Wayne's profile as a place that is technology-enabled. It creates buzz. It's got an important image component that this isn't some backwards place." Making high-bandwidth available to a large number of homes and businesses here could create demand for new types of goods and services, said Mike Fritsch, president of Zoom Information Systems, a Fort-Wayne-based developer of intelligent transportation systems.

"If you go to the consumer electronics shows, you can see some neat things that are sort of integration between phones and computers and entertainments devices--things that really take a lot of bandwidth to work," he said.

"Having this (affordable high bandwidth) in Fort Wayne will hopefully make us a test bed for these kinds of systems. You may see companies trying things here because we're among the first communities to have that.

"When companies come here to try things out, they may open up offices here or use existing companies that are here to implement things," he said. "Whether you'd actually see companies move here or not is hard to say, but it's possible. It definitely is not going to hurt, that's for sure."

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(c) 2005, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News. For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.

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Source: The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Ind.)

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