Comcast Emphasizing SMB Segment - Analyst Blog - VanEck ETF Trust VanEck Short Muni ETF (BATS:SMB)

Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), has selected Augusta, Ga, as the second market to lunch business-class DOCSIS 3.0 network (Wideband) with downstream speeds of 100 Mbps and upstream speeds of 15 Mbps. Last September, Comcast rolled-out its first business-class DOCSIS 3.0 in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The business-tier Wideband mainly targets small & medium sized (SMB) enterprises in the U.S.

The SMB segment has become a huge growth opportunity for the cable TV industry. Significant growth of business data and video traffic resulted in an unexpected future growth catalyst. Furthermore, managing wireless backhaul traffic for the mobile towers also opened up a multi-billion dollar market. Cable operators are now gradually offering innovative wireless broadband services to their business customers in order to keep this momentum going.

Various industry researches estimate that the SMB segment as a whole is a $30 billion market opportunity. Despite being a late entrant in this segment, Comcast is quickly gaining strong foothold in his market. In 2009, Comcast generated $828 million revenue from this segment. Management estimated approximately $2.3 billion of annual revenue from SMB segment alone by 2012.

The 100 tier business-class Wideband of Comcast costs $369.95 per month. However, together with this service, Comcast offers Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) Communications Services Pack and virus and spyware protection suite of Symantec Corp. (SYMC) as free of cost.

Industry sources predicted that Comcast is trying hard to develop a super fast Wideband network architecture that will support 250 Mbps download speed. For that Comcast needs to install Wideband cable modems that can bond 8 digital downstream channels to create one larger and faster logical pipe to support throughput of 250 Mbps. As of now Broadcom Corp. (BRCM) and Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN) are the two major suppliers of that kind of modem.

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