Whispers getting louder: Comcast ready to target big business customers

The vendors must be getting restless: That's when details about Comcast's (Nasdaq: CMCSA) workings leak out. Word on the street, and reported by Light Reading Cable's Jeff Baumgartner, is that Comcast is ready to attack the mid-to-large enterprise space and mobile backhaul with fiber and carrier Ethernet technologies.

Comcast, as is its wont, hinted that it might be going after bigger business customers when it talked about its fourth quarter earnings in February. The company has long maintained a small-medium business (SMB) service using existing HFC networks to feed offices such as FierceCable.

Now, "sources familiar with Comcast's strategy" say the ball is rolling to build fiber links to buildings within city and suburban sites via point-to-point Ethernet.

Comcast joins other cable operators--notably Cablevision Systems (NYSE: CVC) and Cox Communications--who have laid out fiber-to-the-enterprise networks already as part of separate business class organizations within their MSO units. The Light Reading Cable report suggests that Juniper Networks and Ciena will be the beneficiaries of Comcast's move and that the MSO has "already qualified Juniper's MX-series routers to support the enterprise and backhaul applications, and has given the OK to Ciena for the backhaul piece."

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