50Mbps down, 5Mbps up, shame that Comcast only rolled this out in Minneapolis/St. Paul (what, was Mars taken?) and priced it like water in the desert.

Yes fine, I’m bitter that I don’t get the chance to try out net access in the US that starts to approach what Japanese customers get on average.

Minneapolis/St. Paul gets to be the lucky test community, if you can call $150 a month a privilege to pay.  USA Today says it’s an arms race between Comcast and Verizon to see who gets to chest-thump and say they have the fastest service:

The service, informally called wideband, can transmit a high-definition movie in about 10 minutes. It would take about 40 minutes to do that on Comcast’s most popular Internet service and more than an hour on most cable systems.

“An extreme gamer who wants the lowest (delay) that’s available would find it interesting,” says Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s high-speed Internet general manager. “Also, we are deploying this to our business services customers. There are a lot of uses for it there.” 

But Comcast plans an ambitious rollout at a time when subscriber growth in its lucrative Internet business is slowing, and rivals led by Verizon are making inroads. “Comcast, for better or worse, is in an arms race with Verizon and has to keep pace with the speeds it’s offering,” says Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett. That could be significant, because “Cable operators generally move as a pack,” he says.

This is great and everything, especially if you’re in the 32 percent of communities where Verizon and Comcast will be fighting with knives over customers. If you’re not, well, maybe someday Google will get that white space 700MHz spectrum wireless broadband up and running.