Email Contact for Business Ethernet

If you state the location (city, state) for the service, and supply your email contact, I can pass that to a Comcast business rep. who can forward it to a rep. in charge of your service addresses as a lead.  I don't know if they would be willing to discuss business Ethernet via email, howerver.  Generally they are going to need the site address and a human at the site who can discuss the technical issues with them.

Their business ethernet is capped at 7MB on copper, to go any higher they have to bring in fiber so that means your service addresses must be close to a fiber run plus they must have access from the street in.  Often in multitenant office buildings that access is problematical, that is why the rep. wants to see the layout.  Also they have flexibility on pricing and they want to see what they are getting into.  Some sketchy guy with a tiny office jammed with servers is probably going to pay a much higher price for his por...I mean data serving, than a legitimate business with a nice waiting room and an admin assistant with a $5,000 smile, if you get my meaning...

Ha! Pretty picture. We are mostly handling government contracts, so I guess it depends on your definition of 'sketchy' 😉 Not even close to that $5,000 smile, though!

Before I pitch Business Ethernet as an alternative to cable, I need to establish a rough price range for a 50/50 fiber solution. Most of the quotes floating around online date back a couple of years and run between $1500 - $2500 a month. If it's close to the lower bound, I might have a chance of selling this solution to the owner. Any higher, and there will be no need to waste everyone's time on a site surview. Provided, of course, fiber actually is available in our neck of the woods (i.e., PA 19406).

Thanks a lot for your input so far, and please keep 'em coming!

Bests, Mike

Hello canut and welcome,

Comcast doesn't support BGP on the Small Business COAX Internet Service.  They support 1, 5 or 13 Static IP addresses.

If you want to connect with a BGP service with Comcast, you can utilize the Metro Ethernet Fiber products.  The MetroE fiber optic products provide speeds of 1Mbps to 10Gbps dedicated symmetrical speeds, supports BGP, includes 8-254 IP addresses.

The service pulls fiber directly to your location, connects into a Ciena switch which hands off an RJ-45 to you.  If you already have an AS number and IP addresses from ARIN, Comcast can route your existing IP block.  If you have IP's from your existing carrier, they can route those as well (with an LOA from the IP owner).  It has higher level SLA's and may be a bit pricey for being a low priority backup.

You may want to check out http://business2.comcast.com/ethernet or call 866-429-3123 for some straight and accurate information.

Hope this helps you out.

I believe he is looking for private metro area ethernet not Internet connectivity so BGP does not apply.  I also do not believe he will have any success unless he talks to a sales rep.  There are way too many variables and each of these adds to the quote.  For example as you pointed out some services are only available over fiber.   He can, however, get a metro area ethernet connection that is fiber at one site and copper at another for private ethernet.

One last thing it is possible to have 2 addresses that are physiclaly next door to each other and one can get fiber and the other cannot.  A site survey - which costs absolutely nothing - is required before they can even tell you if you can get fiber or not.  The address maps are very general and only tell if fiber is somewhere in the vicinity they don't tell if there's a moat with alligators in it in between the fiber trench and your building.

The comcast reps probably are lucky to get a 15% sale to query ratio and even if your not sure if you can afford it or not, they aren't going to regard a site survey as a waste of time.  If you think at all you might do it - then you need to pursue it.

tmittelstaedt, when are going to read posts in this forum completely where I specifically provided the following information within my post :

"You may want to check out http://business2.comcast.com/ethernet or call 866-429-3123 for some straight and accurate information."

Gentlemen,

Thanks a lot for your input! Our main location has had some infrastructure problems in the past, and we considered ourselves lucky to even get business cable a couple of years ago. At the moment we are paying roughly $150.00 a month for a 75/15 solution, with our alternative to Ethernet being an upgrade to 100/20 at both locations. I sounded out management's pain threshold, which hovers slightly above the total for said solution (~$500.00/month). I don't believe this will get us anywhere near a 50/50 fiber line. Again, no need to waste time on a site survey on a budget like that. I'll be back if the pain becomes too hard to bear 😉

Mike