Comcast Rolls Out Superfast Internet … Elsewhere

Photo by John Murdock via Instagram

Comcast announced plans to release a new lightning-fast Internet service in three markets markets, but Philadelphia will have to wait to get its turn.

Dubbed Gigabit Pro, it delivers 2-gigabit-per-second service to homes via a fiber network. Comcast boasts that the service is “at least double what anyone else provides.”

Still seeming to be in ‘pilot mode,’ the company plans to roll out Gigabit Pro first in Atlanta next month, then in the San Francisco area in June. Just this week, the company announced a third market: South Florida. Philadelphia, and other markets, will have to wait until the end of the year.

“We’ll first offer this service in Atlanta and roll it out in additional cities soon with the goal to have it available across the country and available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year,” said Marcien Jenckes, executive vice president of Consumer Services in a blog post.

Why not test it out in Philly, the company’s own backyard? A Comcast representative declined to comment.

It’s no secret that Comcast is in the midst of trying to save its $45.2 billion merger with Time Warner Cable. Perhaps a San Francisco rollout of Gigabit Pro will get the tech community talking positively about the service?

Meanwhile, FierceTelecom reports that AT&T may be getting the jump on Comcast in another key market: Chicago. It details the differences between the two services:

One of the key differences that separate AT&T from Comcast is usage caps. AT&T’s 1-Gig service also imposes a 1,000 gigabyte usage limit. Google Fiber does not implement usage caps on its FTTP offerings and Comcast has also said it won’t impose any usage caps on its Gigabit Pro service.

Follow @JaredShelly on Twitter. Jared is the editor of Philadelphia magazine’s launching-soon business blog, @BizPhilly.