Comcast's Brian Roberts, Broadband's Tomorrow Man
Brian Roberts, chief executive officer of Comcast Corp., in a move reminiscent of Microsoft's Bill Gates' futuristic announcements at CES, today showed off a new modem that uses channel bonding technology that can pump data into your homes at speeds of 150 megabits per second.
Context & Ripple Effects
The modem demo Associated Press filed from the show floor yesterday gets its full GigaOM treatment here: Brian Roberts using a keynote-style stage moment — explicitly likened to Bill Gates' CES futurism — to put a working 150 Mbps channel-bonding modem on display rather than a roadmap slide.
The framing across outlets matters more than the number: Multichannel News ran it under Roberts' own thesis that cable 'wideband' will trump the telcos, so this reads less as a product launch and more as Comcast planting a speed benchmark in the escalating cable-versus-telco broadband war of 2007.
First-order effects
- Comcast gains an immediate talking point against telephone-company fiber marketing: a demonstrated 150 Mbps over its existing cable plant, before any commercial deployment date is attached.
- Roberts personally becomes Comcast's product face, borrowing the CEO-as-futurist playbook the piece attributes to Gates' CES appearances.
Second-order effects
- Telco competitors are pushed to answer on raw downstream numbers rather than price alone, since a cable operator claiming 150 Mbps undercuts the pitch for switching to fiber.
- Channel bonding shifts the upgrade argument from 'replace the network' to 'add channels to the network,' letting cable operators promise big speed jumps without the construction bill that new fiber builds require.
Third-order effects
- If wideband delivers, cable's hybrid plant stays competitive far longer than fiber advocates assumed, entrenching incumbent cable share in US broadband instead of forcing a rebuild cycle.
- Keynote speed demos become a recurring ritual of the bandwidth market — benchmarks announced for competitive positioning years ahead of rollout, with actual subscriber speeds lagging the stage number.
The trend: Cable operators are countering telco fiber builds by layering channel-bonding 'wideband' upgrades onto existing coax, turning speed announcements into the broadband market's primary competitive weapon.