Comcast Introduces Metro Ethernet Services For Mid-Sized Businesses

Comcast Corp. is moving into the mid-sized business data market in Michigan.

The Southfield office of the Philadelphia-based cable and telecom giant Monday announced Metro Ethernet services for metro Detroit, part of an ongoing strategy to expand its portfolio of business services to meet the requirements of larger customers.

Targeted at mid-sized businesses with 20 to 500 employees, Comcast's Metro Ethernet services provide access to the company's next-generation fiber optic network for businesses with high-bandwidth needs and often multiple locations. The services are now available in more than 20 major United States markets, with expansion into new markets planned in the months ahead.

Analysts expect the U.S. business carrier Ethernet services market will continue to grow by double-digits as mid-sized businesses look to streamline the cost and performance of their wide area networks by upgrading to Ethernet from legacy technologies such as T1 lines, Frame Relay and ATM.
Today, customers with those services typically must rely on bonding multiple T1 lines or fractional T3 lines. Doing so can result in an expensive and limited capacity solution unable to address escalating bandwidth requirements for cloud computing, business continuity, business process automation, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and other applications.

Comcast Metro Ethernet services are delivered using the Company's industry leading fiber-based IP network. Unlike competitive carriers that simply resell the phone company's network, Comcast is giving customers a true alternative network to maximize the performance and reliability of their business communications and applications.

Comcast delivers bandwidth from 1 megabit per second up to 10 gigabits per second that can be remotely scaled in increments of one megabit, 10 megabits, 100 megabits or one gigabit per second, and offered with three different classes of service.

Comcast is the first carrier of Metro Ethernet services to have all three certifications from the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF 9, 14 and 18), which are backed by strict service level agreements, and monitored around the clock from Comcast's dedicated Network Operations Centers.

Said Sandra Palumbo, research fellow at Yankee Group: "As mid-sized businesses increasingly operate within a virtualized IT environment of cloud and SaaS resources to improve productivity and reduce operational expenses, their demand for secure, reliable and high-performance connectivity will continue to grow. This market segment has high-bandwidth requirements across multiple sites and values the lower cost of ownership, simplicity and scalable capacity of Metro Ethernet. Significant last mile networks and investments in advanced Carrier Ethernet network infrastructure are vital."

Delivered from an industry leading fiber-based IP network featuring more than 147,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serving 20 of the nation's 25 largest markets, Comcast offers four Metro Ethernet Services, including:

* Ethernet Private Line Service – point-to-point connectivity between two customer sites for bandwidth-intensive applications.
* Ethernet Virtual Private Line Service – a point-to-multipoint connection that allows customers to tailor bandwidth, performance characteristics and cost to meet the needs of their applications.
* Ethernet Network Service – multipoint-to-multipoint connectivity to connect organizations with high-bandwidth requirements and multiple locations across Comcast's network.
* Ethernet Dedicated Internet Access Service – continuous, high-bandwidth connectivity between customers' LANs and the public Internet.

Comcast said additional markets will be launched on an ongoing basis.

For more information, call (800) 391-3000 or visit http://business.comcast.com.