Comcast Business picked up another sporting venue contract for its metro Ethernet business. The Oakland Athetics have selected the cable MSO’s Business Ethernet services to bring high speed internet to the O.co Coliseum for the first time.
Yes for the first time, unless you consider the 9Mbps connection they’d been using to be a high speed connection, which it wouldn’t even be for residential use. That minimal bandwidth has been supporting daily operations for 175 employees, jumping to 400 employees when the team is in town — a clearly untenable situation in today’s world.
The A’s now have a 100Mbps connection to play with, although these days that’s still not all that much. I’ll bet they probably have to scale that up to a GigE before long, given that they are also planning cloud-based disaster recovery and other projects. After all, the expense doesn’t even register next to even the smallest player salary I’d think.
Like the other cable MSOs, Comcast has been quietly pushing its business Ethernet services across most of its footprint to substantial success. Most of the deals aren’t as high profile as MLB stadiums, but it’s all definitely starting to add up.
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I think this is a much bigger story than a simple win for Comcast. Over the last 4 years Comcast has been slowly moving up the fixed line value chain, starting with resi, than to mom & pop micro-businesses and now SMEs.
This Oakland As account is surely one the likes of LVLT, XO, and similarly situated companies should have won. In fact, given LVLT’s relationship with the MLB, you would think they had the pole position going into the race for this business. Yet, somehow, Comcast comes away with it.
Whether or not Comcast bought the business is really not relevant because they have deep enough pockets to cross-subsidize it if they choose. With Comcast being virtually unregulated more entrenched telcos like LVLT, XO, Earthlink, Windstream, etc. will not have much success competing with Comcast in a price war.
I could imagine Comcast initially using price as a battering ram to break into new markets to establish a foothold until they have built a strong enough reputation for quality service. (That’s pretty much what they did to break into the high speed resi internet access market.) Once established as a legitimate player in this space, they will become a fierce competitor.
At that point they can choose to continue the organic path they’ve pursued on micro and small business markets or they can go inorganic. Personally, I think they should go organic as it will create more LT shareholder value than overpaying for and integrating some other heavily baggaged player with a lot of duplicative network. (The one argument for inorganic is that Comcast’s strong credit rating would enable it to refi debt at a much lower rate.)
If Comcast can get large enterprises comfortable with their network and product offerings, they will undoubtedly pose big issues and challenges for carriers dedicated to this space.
It has certainly been interresting to watch Comcast evolve from a simple cable operator into a media & communictions powerhouse.
They still have no mobile strategy but I suspect somewhere in their corporate development department there’s a playbook for that too.
Wow lots of nonsense. It is a marketing deal and nothing more… And if you think lvlt and xo are “entrenched” you are a maniac – you couldn’t find two more unstable wack job ponzi scheme companies out there.
what’s a “marketing deal”? Are they providing a service? If so, what service? If a service, why is it a marketing deal?
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