Comcast Business says enterprise group is making inroads with large health care, retail enterprise customers

Comcast Business may still be a nascent provider in the large business market, but the service provider is winning deals with large health care and retail outlets that have thousands of locations.

RELATED: Comcast Business finds enterprise growth in branch offices, sees Q2 revenue jump to $1.4B

Neil Smit, CEO of Comcast Cable, told investors that while small business makes up most of its business base, medium and even large businesses are turning to the cable MSO for Ethernet and cloud-based services.

“Small and medium businesses are still about 70 percent of the business and 60 percent of the growth,” Smit said. “We’re seeing healthy growth from mid-sized businesses and we’re getting a number of enterprise deals.”

Smit added that “we’re starting to see the enterprise side of the business starting to grow.”

Specifically, Comcast Business has won a service deal with a large financial company that has about 2,000 locations, a large health care provider with 1,000 locations and a retail provider with 2,000 locations.

In order to attract new customers, Comcast is taking a proactive approach by pre-building fiber into business parks that have a high density of businesses. 

“We used to go into an industrial park and we had to sign up the customer first, whereas now we know in these industrial parks we’re going to get the customers and it’s a question of time of when we get them on-net,” Smit said. “We’re building in the fiber assuming we’re going to get a customer base so it’s a bit of a more aggressive stance.”

Comcast Business just announced today a multi-million dollar expansion of its fiber-based network across Montgomery County, Maryland, for example. Upon completing this build, Comcast will be able to deliver up to 100 Gbps of network capacity.

The cable MSO said that the investment will provide businesses with high-performance Ethernet, internet and advanced voice solutions in areas of economic growth, including the Bethesda Arts & Entertainment District, the Interstate 270/Life Sciences and IT Corridor running through West Rockville, West Gaithersburg and Germantown as well as the downtown areas of Bethesda, Silver Spring, Takoma Park and Rockville.

Business services revenue rose 15.5 percent year-over-year to $1.4 billion due to what Comcast said was an increase in the number of small business customers, as well as continued growth in its medium-sized business service customers.

From an overall financial perspective, Comcast reported that third quarter consolidated revenue rose 14.2 percent to $21.3 billion, including $1.6 billion of revenue generated by the broadcast of the 2016 Rio Olympics in the third quarter of 2016, of which $1.2 billion is related to advertising revenue.