Smart TVs and other popular consumer electronics can’t offer consumers their full range of capabilities if they aren’t connected to fast, reliable internet. America still lags many nations (especially Asian countries) in providing its citizens with speedy broadband connections, but there have been some considerable improvements to internet access in the US over the last several years. According to Pew Research, 77% of US adults said that they had broadband at home in 2021 (up from 73% in 2019), and even in more rural areas of the country, 72% of Americans now have broadband access.
As internet tech continues to improve, leading telecoms are competing to offer faster and even more responsive broadband access to support video streaming, gaming, video conferencing, remote work, and more. Comcast took a major step in that direction recently with the deployment of its new “hollowcore” fiber optic internet in partnership with fiber cable solutions provider, Lumenisity. The name was derived from the fact that the cable, unlike traditional solid glass core fiber, is hollow inside and allows data to travel up to 150% faster with about 33% less latency.
The new technology is part of the telecom’s larger plan – 10G Evolution – to “deliver reliable multigigabit upload and download speeds over the connections already installed in tens of millions of homes and businesses.” Comcast Cable Executive VP Elad Nafshi remarked, “As we continue to develop and deploy technology to deliver 10G… hollowcore fiber will help to ensure that the network powering those experiences is among the most advanced and highest performing in the world.”
Comcast said that it’s added more than 50,000 new route miles of fiber to its network since 2017 and is continuing to build more fiber into cities and towns across the US. Although hollowcore fiber is not widely available yet, Comcast was able to connect two locations in Philadelphia across 40 kilometers, which has given the company’s network engineers a chance to test and monitor the performance and physical compatibility of hollowcore fiber in a real-world deployment.
According to Interpret’s New Media Measure®, Comcast Xfinity internet subscribers engage in many high-bandwidth activities each week and could benefit from improved speeds and lower latency. Comcast subscribers watch nearly nine hours of streaming video and play games online for more than four hours each week.
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