Bandwidth Saves Money, and Comcast is offering Wideband

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Even if you’re only doing half your regular work from home, you’re going to need to have broadband network access. Why is that, you ask? Simply this - the speed that you access the internet will have a large influence on just about everything else you do. With broadband, email checks take seconds - even when there are fairly large attachments. You can keep in contact with customers, co-workers, as well as your spouse/significant other more easily using IM, transfer files, upload job bids, and download presentations or software in a fraction of the time it would take you if you used dial up.

So here’s a bit of math: Since broadband saves you time, and time is money, then broadband saves you money.

So imagine our pleasure when we heard that Comcast is beginning to offer “extreme high-speed” service to subscribers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area, including Hudson, Wisconsin. This is a test system that provides 50Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream. The monthly cost of this service will be about $150.

ArsTechnica noted yesterday that:

“This announcement marks the beginning of the evolution from broadband to wideband,” said Comcast High-Speed Internet SVP Mitch Bowling. “We believe wideband will usher-in a new era of speed and Internet innovation for today’s digital consumers. Wideband is the future, and it’s coming fast.”

Even if you’re already cruising the net at a decent 8-10 Mbps (like I am), this still comes as good news. I often find myself having to download fairly large photoshop and illustrator files, some of which are almost 500MB even when zipped. The difference between waiting 1 minute or 10 minutes for such files is worth the extra money, at least to me.