Comcast's Technology Strategy

Light Reading has published an article that outlines Comcast's IPTV strategy. Comcast is upgrading its network to provide more capacity for digital and data services. Its technology strategy focus on freeing up spectrum and include:

• Wide deployment of switched digital
• Improvements in MPEG-2 encoding efficiency
• Analog reclamation, including the possibility of going all digital before the end of 2006

Comcast currently has nearly two-thirds of its video subscribers using digital services.

Comcast also plans to deploy DOCSIS 3.0 in order to offer very high speed data services.

This program will help Comcast compete better with satellite and IPTV services. It needs to use most of this reclaimed spectrum to increase the number of HD channels that it offers. HD is a strong requirement in the U.S. and Comcast is behind both satellite and IPTV services in its ability to offer HD today.