Comcast's $30M Fiber Investment In Philly Will Help Area Partners Add Customers, Recurring Revenue

Cable giant Comcast has committed $30 million to a major expansion of its fiber-based network around the site of its headquarters in Philadelphia.

The rollout will put more than 3,000 new business customers on the Comcast Business fiber footprint, a service that offers internet speeds up to 100 Gbps. The expansion includes more than 50 fiber miles within Center City and University City, Philadelphia's two largest business districts, according to Comcast.

The expanded fiber footprint will let channel partners reach more business customers, sell more strategic services, and earn more recurring revenue, said Ed Terry, founding partner of Expert Technology Associates (ETA), a telecommunications solution provider and Platinum Comcast partner.

[Related: Comcast's Solid Q3 Results Boosted By Double-Digit Growth In Business Services]

"Comcast is building a strong connectivity highway that makes the customer experience better, which puts [us] in the position to offer our intellectual property and drive our revenue up – it's a win-win-win scenario where Comcast, the customer, and we win," Terry said.

Comcast Business wants partners to use its fiber-based infrastructure to deliver advanced solutions, such as Ethernet, internet, Wi-Fi, voice, cable and managed services to more businesses customers. Comcast said its expansion plans will make its high-speed network "more accessible and affordable" to new customers.

Like Comcast, ETA is based in Philadelphia. Comcast has already deployed its Business fiber network within some areas of Philadelphia, an offering that ETA has been selling to small-business and multilocation midmarket customers throughout Philadelphia, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. According to Terry, ETA has grown its revenue with Comcast by 240 percent over the past three years and expects to see an additional 20 percent to 30 percent growth year over year as customers migrate to Comcast's Business services citywide.

David Dombroski, regional vice president for Comcast Business, called the expansion the most significant infrastructure build-out to date. "As demand in Philadelphia for our high-performance Ethernet offerings continues to soar, Comcast Business recognizes the need to respond quickly to new businesses to provide scalable solutions that can meet demand as they grow," he said in a statement.

The demand for high-speed internet services is growing, especially as schools, financial institutions, hospitals, and businesses with distributed locations increasingly adopt bandwidth-hungry applications, such as video and collaboration solutions, ETA's Terry said.

With the availability of a fiber network, partners selling these applications and services won't have to worry about quality, or potentially losing the deal entirely, he said.

"I think it opens up a lot of communications and collaboration opportunities," Terry said.

Businesses also are requiring more bandwidth to connect multiple office locations to a third-party data center or cloud service provider securely, he said.

"The number one thing that customers want you to protect is their data, and making sure their critical applications, their phone system to their emails, are always up and running," Terry said. "It's not enough to have great connectivity coming into your office, it also has to come with reliability, and what Comcast is building is very reliable because it doesn't rely on the last mile."

Comcast said that the network expansions within the Philadelphia area are slated to be completed by the end of 2016.