As we’ve been saying for nearly three years, “gig speed” internet is right around the corner for small businesses. But here at SmallBusiness.com HQ, three different providers have yet to come knocking on our door, despite our office being just a few feet away from the fiber that’s been laid for, well, nearly three years. Now, one of those providers has announced a whole new high-speed internet access service that requires no new fiber. Even better,  one of the first four markets they’re rolling out the new service is our hometown, Nashville. But don’t fret, they’ll be coming to your town soon, if you believe press releases.

Note: The editor made us add these 2 geek-glossary notes before jumping straight into the deep end of the Megabit pool.

1 | The acronym “DOCSIS” is from the term “Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification” and is a telecommunications standard that permits the addition of high-speed data transfer using an existing cable TV (CATV) system. When you see the term DOCSIS it will sometimes include the version number at the end of the acronym, (e.g., DOCSIS 3.1).

2 | 1 Gig speed refers to a super fast internet speed (super fast = 1,000 Megabits per second, or Mbps. 1,000 Mbps = a Gigabit per second, thus “1 Gig speed”). 500 speed refers to internet speed that’s 500 Mpgs. The speed of a typical fixed broadband connection to the internet in the U.S. is (are you sitting down?) 11 Mbps. But forget all this math. Here’s clever video to explain the difference in internet speeds.

So, where were we?

Comcast Business (a part of the giant cable and entertainment company) today announced it has begun offering two “speed tiers” of high-speed internet access to business customers in its Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit and Nashville service areas. Enabled by DOCSIS 3.1, Comcast will offer internet access in both 500 Mbps and 1,000 Mbps speeds. Branded “Business Internet 1 Gig” and “Business Internet 500,” the two speed tiers are now available to thousands of business customers in these Comcast service areas using the company’s existing network (i.e., no digging up streets like those Google Fiber folks).

For small and mid-sized businesses in buildings already served by Comcast, upgrading to Business Internet 1 Gig or Business Internet 500 will be as simple as calling Comcast or visiting business.comcast.com/gig to change their service, and ordering a new modem.

Without having to install fiber, Comcast has the potential to deploy gigabit service more widely across its existing network. Comcast has an additional enterprise internet service called Comcast Business Ethernet, which the company launched and has been expanding nationally since 2011. Those services can support speeds of 100 gigabits per second over fiber.

Don’t worry, the service is coming your way soon

In addition to the markets announced today, Comcast Business plans to launch Business Internet 1 Gig and Business Internet 500 in the majority of its service areas throughout 2017 and into 2018.

Pricing for the services varies based on a business’s location. (We’ll update this post after Comcast comes knocking on our door.)

Google Fiber is laying off or reassigning about nine percent of its staff as well as “pausing” or ending fiber operations in 10 cities where it hadn’t yet fully committed to building, according to Arstechnica.com.

Google Fiber already offers high-speed internet service in eight metro areas and is still committed to building in another four. The company recently purchased a wireless ISP called Webpass, which offers high-speed wireless internet in six metro areas. According to the Arstechnica, “(Google) seems set on expanding wireless service going forward.”

Quote from Arstechnica:

“Google Fiber apparently has not hit its subscriber goals, and fiber construction is a costly endeavor. While the company isn’t giving up on fiber entirely, it may be able to deploy Internet service at a lower cost using wireless technology.”

Google Fiber is already available in these cities

• Atlanta
• Austin
• Charlotte
• Kansas City, Missouri
• Kansas City, Kansas
• Nashville
• Provo
• Salt Lake City
• Triangle area of North Carolina

Google Fiber is still publicly committed to building in these cities

• Huntsville, Ala.
• Irvine, Calif.
• San Antonio
• Louisville

Google Fiber operations will be paused or ended in these cities

• Chicago
• Dallas
• Jacksonville
• Los Angeles
• Oklahoma City
• Phoenix
• Portland
• San Diego
• San Jose
• Tampa

Webpass Cities

Google Fiber’s recently purchased Webpass provides fiber-like speeds. However, while the wireless technology is cost-effective for multi-unit residential buildings and businesses, it is not in suburban single-family homes.

Webpass is already available in these cities

• Boston
• Chicago
• Miami
• San Diego
• Oakland
• San Francisco

VIA | Arstechnica.com
Photo: Google Fiber

In it, we said:

“One issue that is already having a negative impact on businesses—and could worsen without more competition—is the growing gap between the speed of internet access available to most small businesses in the U.S. vs. other countries in the world where fiber optics networks are more widely available.”

Fast forward to today.

Reported first by Bloomberg.com, Comcast Corp. is dropping its proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc. due to growing resistance in Washington. This week, U.S. Federal Communications Commission staff joined lawyers at the Justice Department opposing the transaction. FCC officials told representatives of the two biggest U.S. cable companies on Wednesday that they are leaning toward concluding the merger doesn’t help consumers.

According to the New York Times, the issue we focused on when the deal was announced is precisely the issue that brought down the merger.

Quote via NYTimes.com:

“In this sense, it didn’t really matter if Comcast and Time Warner’s cable markets overlapped. The real issue was broadband.”

Bottom line for small business

As we have reported over the past 18 months, having access to the internet at speeds over 100 times faster than what is today called broadband will open up a wave of innovation in the ways we work, the products we can produce and the relationships we can sustain.

And because of the FCC’s recent decision in favor of net neutrality, access to such speeds will be available to small businesses at the same price as it’s available to giant corporations (in much the same way that any car, whether owned by a large company or small, can drive over a toll-bridge for the same price).

As most often is the case, competition is good.

Do you believe the acquisition would have benefitted small businesses? Add your point-of-view in the comments below.

If you’ve been following our updates about the rollout of high-speed internet “gigaspeed” fiber networks, you’ll recognize a pattern in which a city’s incumbent phone or cable company will have no plans to upgrade their existing network until Google Fiber announces it is coming to town.

Then the incumbent suddenly announces its own plans for higher speed internet access. As they say: “Competition is good.” Especially when it comes to competition over internet access at faster internet speeds for the same price as the speeds it will be replacing.

That’s the most recent update from the faster ‘net  battle in Charlotte, N.C., where, as we reported in January, Google is set to begin installing a fiber network. Time Warner Cable, the incumbent cable provider, is trying to pre-empt Google Fiber by upgrading its existing network to a completely digital one that will boost internet speeds to about six times their current speeds—for no additional costs.

While nowhere near as fast as the fiber network Google will be installing, Time Warner can get their upgrade installed faster. And there’s nothing to complain about with the price of the improved speeds: the same as today.

As Kate Cox of The Consumerist writes, “when Google announces plans to expand into a new market, competitors either strive to dive in first or drop prices to match. In short, even customers who don’t sign up with Google benefit from Google’s entrance into their local markets.”

It’s “almost as if competition is a real and valuable thing that spurs businesses to offer better service, at better prices, to consumers,” she writes with tongue solidly in cheek.

(Photo: ThinkStock.com)

In recent months, we’ve tracked several announcements related to cable, data, phone providers [and Google] rolling out high-speed, fiber “gigabit speed” access to the internet. The term “gigabit speed” comes from the measurement of such speed, gigabit-per-second, or Gbps. One gigabit-per-second is about 150 times faster than what is today considered “broadband” [or, as we will start referring to as “wired broadband” to designate that it is delivered via wire and not fiber.] The announcement by Comcast in this article refers to a speed of 2 Gbps. This is twice the speed of the fiber networks we’ve previously covered. The article mentions that Comcast already delivers access to the internet to businesses at speeds up to 10 Gbps.

Comcast announced on Thursday it will offer residential 2 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) internet access service to more than 1.5 million customers in Atlanta starting in May 2015. The service, branded Gigabit Pro, will be delivered via a fiber-to-the-home solution. Service will be offered broadly across the Atlanta metro area and will be the fastest residential internet speed in the country, according to the company.

“Our approach is to offer the most comprehensive rollout of multi-gigabit service to the most homes as quickly as possible, not just to certain neighborhoods,” said Doug Guthrie, SVP of Comcast Cable’s South Region.

The service is now just limited to residential customers. It appears to be a move to defend itself against competitors like AT&T (who threatened to halt its fiber expansion plans before the FCC’s recent “net neutrality” vote, but despite losing that effort, announced on Monday plans to expand service in Silicon Valley). Comcast has a large base of small business customers in Atlanta service areas, as well. Companies like Google Fiber have started new service in a region with residential customers, but have followed up with small business services.

Gigabit Pro will be available to any home within close proximity of Comcast’s fiber network and will require an installation of professional-grade equipment. The company has fiber at the core of its network and, for the past decade, it has been extending it deeper into neighborhoods and closer to homes. To date, Comcast has built out more than 145,000 route miles of fiber across its service area.

Comcast has been delivering multi-gig (up to 10 Gbps) ethernet service to businesses since 2010. The company currently serves more than 1.5 million businesses nationwide. Earlier this month, Comcast announced a technology partnership with the Atlanta Braves to deliver multi-gigabit speeds to residences and businesses throughout the team’s new mixed use and stadium development project.

Google Fiber’s gigabit service offers speeds about 100 times faster than the average speed available in the U.S.

Speaking with business, tech and civic leaders at a Nashville midday news conference, Kevin Lo, director of Google Fiber business and operations, highlighted the relationship between music and technology in Nashville as two deciding factors making the city the right place for super high-speed service.

With a music scene “like no other,” and a strong commitment to technology and entrepreneurship, Nashville has “all the right ingredients to do transformative things,” Lo said. (Google is a sponsor of Nashville’s new music-tech business accelerator, one of its many areas of involvement in the city.)

While the four Southeastern cities know that Google Fiber is heading their way, “the hard work is just beginning,” said Lo. The installation of the fiber network could take up to two years to engineer and deploy. “You’ll see hundreds of crews around the city installing the network,” he said.

Nashville is the second city in Tennessee to get gigabyte speed internet service. Chattanooga created one of the nation’s first high-speed services using a public utility model and earning the city a new nickname, Gig City.

AT&T Stays on the Gig Speed Sideline

After Google signaled it was taking fiber into new cities across the country, AT&T announced similar plans to 100 cities it already serves. But then, last November, AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson announced the company is going to hold off on their plans because President Obama encouraged the Federal Communications Commission to regulate AT&T more like public utilities–as part of his support for net neutrality.

In today’s announcement, Google’s Lo did not mention any competitors or net neutrality, except to say in a veiled reference to the issue that Google Fiber would be able to stream Netflix movies with no buffering.

In July, as we reported, ten cities in Texas, North Carolina and Tennessee had been selected as the first cities AT&T to which it would be rolling out the service. (We remember it well, as SmallBusiness.com comes to you from one of those cities listed.)

Well, hit the pause button.

Last week, AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson announced the company is going to hold off on their plans because of President Obama’s unexpected call on the Federal Communications Commission on Monday to regulate major internet access companies (like AT&T) more like public utilities as part of his support for net neutrality.

“We can’t go out and invest that kind of money deploying fiber to 100 cities not knowing under what rules those investments will be governed,” Stephenson said at an analyst conference.

Even though the President can make his point of view known to the FCC, the commission is an independent regulatory body. Its five members are appointed by the President and confirmed by Congress and no more than three members can belong to the same political party.

The White House detailed Obama’s plan in a blog post on Monday, saying that if implemented, it “shouldn’t create any new burden for Internet providers.”

AT&T’s Robertson obviously disagrees.

The policy fight between AT&T and the White House is related to the issue of “net neutrality,” the belief that all data distributed over the internet should have equal access to it. Backers of the concept of net neutrality believe distributing data on the internet should be sold like a gallon of gasoline: no matter how much you buy, it’s going to cost everyone the same price per gallon.

Telecommunications companies like AT&T believe they should have the ability to charge more (per gallon) to large data providers and, in turn, provide them premium services not available to smaller businesses.

While the issue of net neutrality is not directly tied to high speed fiber networks, the popularity of gigabit speed gives AT&T leverage to lobby Congress and the FCC. In the long run, the competitive pressure of other high speed options–be they local citizen-owned utility provided fiber or Google Fiber–will determine AT&T’s decision to defend its cable, phone and internet access competitive position in the markets it serves, not net neutrality.

Unfortunately, as long as AT&T uses fiber as a weapon in its fight against net neutrality, American cities will continue to have the slowest internet access speeds found in the world’s leading economies.

Illstration: SmallBusiness.com via Photo by Jeffery via Flickr. (CC BY 2.0)

The fiber-enabled “gigabit speed” internet access is up to 100-times faster than today’s average broadband speeds, says Google. The Google Fiber service is priced at $100 for Kansas City small businesses lucky enough to be located in the right “fiberhoods” (their word, not ours).

“Earlier this year, we started a pilot in Kansas City to learn more about what business owners need. We heard from documentary filmmakers, flower shops, web development agencies, and more. All of these small businesses have a lot of ideas on how a faster Internet connection could speed up their entire business — we can’t wait to see what they do with Google Fiber,” said Carlos Casas, Google Fiber’s team manager in Kansas City.

Google says it doesn’t have specific plans for small businesses in other cities right now.

The recently released policy paper from the Open Technology Institute, The Cost of Connectivity, 2014, compares the cost and speeds of broadband offerings in 24 cities across the world and finds the U.S. coming up slow.

What most of us in the U.S. call “broadband” access is closer to AOL dialup days than to the speeds many cities (and the businesses in them) have access to around the world. Those cities have the type of speed available only through fiber-based networks; speeds that are up to 100x faster than that available to the typical U.S. internet user.

As we’ve shared before, only a few American cities already have “giga-speed” internet access. Google Fiber (notably, Kansas City on the chart below) and AT&T (and to a lesser extent, other cable companies and telcos) are picking up the pace of competition and expanding into more cities. And some cities, like Chattanooga, Tenn., refused to wait on fiber providers to come to them; they created a city-owned fiber network using the model (and some infrastructure) of other public utilities. (It’s why they rank so highly on the chart below.)

If competition between the major telcos and cable companies doesn’t drive the expansion of fiber networks, then it may be up to municipalities to take matters into their own hands–like Chattanooga. That Tennessee city saw giga-speed internet as a competitive advantage for attracting technology companies — not just from around the U.S., but from around the world.

While the U.S. has led the world in technology development related to the internet, it can still fumble the future if more cities and businesses don’t have access to the internet that is low cost and high speed rather than high cost and low speed.

In April, we reported that AT&T was dangling the promise of the service before cities already under consideration by Google Fiber. The search giant is currently offering Google Fiber in certain parts of Kansas City, Provo and Austin and is currently negotiating with 34 cities regarding its expansion plans.

AT&T says it has over 100 “candidate cities.” (Cox Communications has also announced it has plans to offer Gigabit-speed internet service in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha..

The cities AT&T have confirmed for expansion are:

North Carolina: Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Winston-Salem
Tennessee: Nashville
Texas: Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio