PHILADELPHIA—The cast at a Comcast event at its headquarters here Tuesday went beyond the usual executive suspects to include Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson and the Philadelphia Flyers’ mascot Gritty—all to convey corporate ambitions that go beyond operating the nation’s largest broadband service. After Thompson teed up the proceedings with a routine that ended in a shout-out to the company’s service—(“It gives you the ultimate user experience where all of the people and things that you care about converge… see what I did there?”)—Comcast Cable President and CEO Dave Watson launched into the first of a series of sales pitches.“Overall traffic on our network has skyrocketed,” he said. While five years ago, the top 10% of Comcast subscribers used about 700GB of data a month and the top 1% used twice as much, now “the top 10% of users look like the top 1% did.” And the company sees no slowdown in sight. “Today’s superuser is tomorrow’s mainstream,” Watson said. “As consumption has continued to accelerate, our job is to make your online experience extraordinary.”He did not, however, say what this accelerated data consumption might mean for the 1.2TB data cap that Comcast began enforcing in 2012 at a lower threshold and hasn’t raised since 2020. Nor did other Converge speakers mention the data cap, a common and commonly resented practice among many cable operators.Instead, they went into detail about how Comcast has built its network to ensure subscribers won’t feel constrained even during extreme-usage scenarios like streaming the Super Bowl.“We built our network for peak moments,” said Watson. “We’re building a world-class, ready for today and tomorrow network,” chimed in Charlie Herrin, president of Comcast’s cable technology, product and experience group. He said the company built out that network to a million new homes and businesses last year and aims to bring the multi-gigabit speeds it markets as “10G” to most of its network by 2025.Comcast will have a new home gateway to go with these faster connections, the XB10. This white rectangular device will support Wi-Fi 7 and both major flavors of DOCSIS 4.0—an upgrade to cable’s connectivity standard that Comcast plans to deploy on that multi-gigabit foundation to deliver download and even upload speeds competitive with fiber.Comcast, like most cable operators, has charged monthly fees for its modems or gateways unless subscribers buy their own. But Comcast’s DOCSIS 4.0 subscribers—to date, only those in parts of Atlanta, Colorado Springs, and Philadelphia—get a much better deal that Tuesday’s presentations didn’t cover.Not only will they receive this gateway for free when it ships in the second half of this year, Comcast DOCSIS 4.0 subscribers won’t have a data cap either as part of what Comcast calls “X-Class” service. And they’ll pay less over time: Rates start at $55 a month for 300Mbps downloads and uploads, with no contract required and no second-year rate hike hidden in fine print.For the vast majority of Comcast subscribers unable to get X-Class soon, the company showed off other enhancements. For example, the network-management software bundled with its Wi-Fi gateways will let subscribers prioritize specific devices on their home network and alert them when new devices join it, catching up with features of many third-party routers.An update this fall will leverage your existing devices and the data flowing between them to add motion-sensing capabilities at no extra charge. But these updates won’t provide any more clarity to customers about which sites, apps, or services pushed them over the 1.2TB data cap—something that mystifies even expert users.And while other broadband providers are backing away from the pay-TV business as cord cutting rolls on, Comcast had news in that area as well.
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The biggest screens set up in a demo area showed off a “High Fidelity Video” option that combines 4K UHD resolution, HDR color, and Dolby Atmos surround sound with a low-latency feed. During a closed test during the Super Bowl, Watson said that left “only a 10-second difference between a seat in that stadium and your couch.”For streaming viewers, Comcast showed off features in what it now calls its “Entertainment OS” for streaming players that aim to make finding something to watch easier. “There’s never been more choice,” said Fraser Stirling, chief product officer, during one of his turns onstage. “But all that choice means discovery is definitely more complicated than ever.” Comcast is leaning on voice-driven search—I was pleased to see that saying “privacy settings” on the remote for a Xumo player took me right to that screen—but it also showed off a prototype remote app on a tablet that used the device’s camera to read American Sign Language commands. In a chat after the presentation, Avi Greengart, president and lead analyst at Techsponential, pronounced himself particularly impressed by Comcast’s new adventures in Wi-Fi. He pointed to the motion-sensing feature, saying “I’ve seen two Israeli companies that invented the tech, but I haven’t seen any other cable companies doing that.” Greengart also noted the breadth of Comcast’s pitch to customers who, thanks to the rise of fixed-wireless home broadband options, have found it increasingly easy to drop its service. The range of services shown off Tuesday suggests that Comcast thinks it can defend its business, even as its own rates keep rising, by offering a spectrum of features beyond broadband. As Greengart put it: “What was fascinating to me about this was a cable company talking about being a cable company.”
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