Despite speed bumps, Comcast just can’t compete with UTOPIA

Comcast is still trying desperately to stay in the high-speed game, but they just can’t quite seem to pull it off. Their fastest tiers are now 105M/10M and 50M/10M, but with more than a few caveats. Both are $100/mo, but the faster tier requires that you subscribe to at least one other service, and the price is only for 12 months. After that, it skyrockets to $130/mo for the next year and an unspecified price thereafter. So how do UTOPIA providers compare?

Nobody lists pricing on a 100M tier, but all of the residential providers do 50M/50M service ranging from $70-85 per month. XMission is the only one to list a cap, and it’s twice what Comcast allows, plus they’ll actually let you buy more if you need it, something Comcast won’t do. Veracity even tosses in voice service for that price. All of these deals blow Comcast’s 50M/10M tier right out of the water.

So what about the 105M/10M tier? The last public pricing information I’ve seen on 100M/100M was from Fuzecore going for $100/mo. Assuming that price would hold, this would mean that the everyday price from a UTOPIA provider matches the promo price from Comcast, but you don’t have to buy more services in order to get it. Once the promo price disappears, the pricing gap grows even wider.

Another thing to consider is the cap. A friend of mine watches the traffic on his Comcast connection and found that broadcast traffic gobbles up several gigs a month in traffic, even while the connection is idle. That valuable cap space disappearing just as a result of Comcast’s shared network topology, something a point-to-point network like UTOPIA does not suffer from. It’s also of note that only one of the residential providers operates with a cap, it’s twice as much as Comcast’s, and they’ll let you purchase additional transfer at the relatively rock-bottom price of $0.25/gig. For people who plan on having consistent or occasional heavy use, this can be a life-saver compared to a rather vague and unspecified penalty for overages on Comcast’s network.

When it comes down to it, UTOPIA providers are delivering a better product at a better price than Comcast despite the cable giant having most of its network costs already sunk. You tell me who’s focused on value.

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2 Responses to Despite speed bumps, Comcast just can’t compete with UTOPIA

  1. At XMission, we actually upped our soft cap to 1 terabyte of data, and are in the process of upgrading our interconnect to UTOPIA to 10 Gbps to maintain multi-gig redundancy.

  2. Ronald D. Hunt says:

    I miss your network, ping times on my copper from the node 12meg adsl2 line are terrible. I miss the sub 40ms to Seattle that I had back with the 1.5 meg dsl(mind you i don’t miss the 1.5 meg dsl). It is rare to see the lag go much below 150ms to anywhere on Qwests network.

    Can’t wait for construction to start in Layton again, hopefully their will be enough interest in my neighborhood for me to get my fiber and Xmission service =p. For what I am paying Qwest for their 12meg dsl line I could afford the 50meg sync fiber service from Utopia.

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