Comcast Business deepens fiber-based Ethernet presence in Vermont

Comcast Business is broadening its presence in Vermont, extending its fiber-based Ethernet services throughout five communities in Bennington County.

By completing this expansion, the service provider will be able to provide its suite of Ethernet services to the communities of North Bennington, Old Bennington, Pownal, Shaftsbury and Woodford.

This new build enhances its presence in Vermont. Already, the service provider offers service in various Vermont communities. Similar to other market expansions, including New York and Texas, this network will support bandwidth up to 10 Gbps.

The company is targeting a mix of businesses, schools, hospitals and other organizations that have various needs for more bandwidth, are looking to network multiple locations together or are planning to connect their offices to a third-party data center.

Paul Savas, vice president of Comcast Business in Vermont, told FierceTelecom that while it has found success with its HFC-based services, the company is seeing more requests from larger businesses where a fiber-based Ethernet service is being required.

"We needed to get into the market with an Ethernet play," Savas said. "As everyone's bandwidth requirements are going up, what they need to have is those associated SLAs that you have on an Ethernet network."

Savas added that while there are fast speeds on "our modem-based coax products, larger organizations that require SLAs like hospitals, municipalities or universities, we're able to provide those SLAs on our Ethernet product, whether it be Ethernet Private Line, Ethernet Virtual Private Line, Ethernet Dedicated Internet or Ethernet Network Services, it fits the bill for the level of reliability that those organizations require."

Vermont may not be as large as other New England markets like Massachusetts, but Comcast is seeing growing demand from larger multi-location businesses that want the security of an Ethernet-based network.

"Besides the education and medical field, we're also finding that those multi-location consumers that would rather have a more secure Ethernet-based WAN as opposed having a VPN network run off of modems for what's required with that extra equipment to firewall it and have routers in place," Savas said. "Those organizations for where prices points have come to now for Ethernet services, they find it is a very attractive option to get a fiber-based product as well as have the service level agreements."

While Comcast Business will face off with a host of competitive and incumbent players like First Light Fiber, Level 3 and FairPoint, Savas said its differentiator will be in providing route diversity to every business location.  

"It's a very competitive market, but the most important element we bring to the network is route diversity," Savas said. "We are often riding different transport paths that we take into specific business that are able to give somebody true redundancy for the business because often times we're part of an architecture that includes two carriers bringing in fiber."  

For more:
- see the release

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