As it plunges billions of dollars into its main hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) network to upgrade it to a 10 gigabit-per-second transom, Comcast has already welcomed the elite cadre of well-heeled customers who can afford its $300-a-month Gigabit Pro fiber-to-the-home service into the 10G future.
In a company blog post published Tuesday, Elad Nafshi, Comcast executive VP and chief network officer, announced that the Gigabit Pro service has been upgraded from 10 Gbps downstream and 6 Gbps upstream to a symmetrical 10-Gbps offering.
It's unclear as to how many of Comcast's 32.3 million broadband customers have access to the fiber-to-the-home tier — you need to live within 1,760 feet from a fiber node to be able to subscribe to it. Also unclear is how many customers have actually signed up for the offering.
It’s prohibitively expensive. Beyond the $300 monthly bill, installation, activation and equipment rental fees total over $1,000.
But if you need a reliable, low-latency symmetrical 10-Gbps connection today, it might be available.
“Our network is architected to give us options to deliver a great experience over both HFC and fiber-to-the-home technologies,” Nafshi wrote. “For our customers who are on the bleeding edge of tech adoption, we recently increased the speeds of our symmetrical FTTH service, Gigabit Pro, to 10Gbps/10Gbps, and that is available in all the markets we serve.”