comcast
Residents and businesses in the northern suburbs of the Houston area will soon be able to purchase high-speed Internet service from Comcast. Comcast announced this year that it will install more than 1,000 miles of fiber-optic infrastructure in Grimes, Liberty, Montgomery and Waller counties. .
Philadelphia-based Comcast, one of several cable TV and Internet providers in the Houston area, is investing 200 million yen to bring the Xfinity network to communities such as Cleveland, Conroe, Hempstead, Montgomery, Navasota and Porter. It announced last week that it would invest more than $65 million. . Comcast said the expansion is expected to add more than 100,000 potential new residential and commercial customers by the end of this year, including about 20,000 new residential and commercial customers in Conroe, about 40 miles north of Houston. This includes millions of people.
“We are expanding our fiber highways and strategically investing in regions experiencing significant growth,” Jose Espinel, regional senior vice president for Comcast Texas, said in a news release. “By establishing the best broadband infrastructure today, we are ensuring the economic prosperity of these communities tomorrow.”
Mark Vena, a former executive at Compaq Computer Corp. in Houston and now CEO and principal analyst at California-based SmartTech Research, said Comcast’s broadband expansion is a boon for the company. It is said that it will be brought. He called this a “great update opportunity” for Comcast, but also said the company is trying to catch up with some of its competitors in fiber-optic infrastructure, which has become the industry standard.
AT&T, another prominent provider in the Houston area, said it spent more than $1.3 billion in the region from 2020-22 to expand its wireless and wireline network infrastructure. The company also said it plans to “serve hundreds of thousands of additional locations over the next few years, with the goal of bringing fiber to every household in the Houston metropolitan area.”
Houston-based Ezee Fiber, one of the small companies providing fiber-optic communications services, announced in November that it would invest $200 million to expand its network in Fort Bend County, southwest of the city.
“I’m glad Comcast is finally taking action on this,” Vena said. “I think they were woefully behind on the eight ball.”
Comcast said its broadband expansion outside of Houston is part of a broader $3 billion investment in Texas over the past three years. Across the state, AT&T announced it invested nearly $7.6 billion in fiber infrastructure from 2020-22.
Comcast is particularly “aggressive” in expanding its network into adjacent and nearby markets it already serves, said Jeff Baumgartner, senior editor at trade publication Light Reading. .
“They must have found a reasonable location around Houston to expand their network and extend service to new areas, and they need fiber to provide that,” Baumgartner said. Ta. “They tend to do a lot of research on where to build. They decide, ‘Based on the current level of competition, it makes sense to build here,’ and where they can get a good return.” There is.”
