Comcast CEO Brian Roberts showed off his company's latest and greatest tech at the NCTA's Cable Show 2011 yesterday. Using a demonstration cable network, the executive wowed attendees by downloading all 23 episodes of "30 Rock" Season 5 – close to nine hours of content – in 1 minute and 39 seconds. He then showed the speedtest.net result measuring the throughput, which indicated the connection had sustained 1084.71 Mbps.
"This demonstration of extreme 1 gigabit-per-second speed on our network is another leap forward in innovation, and we're excited to work with developers to see what amazing new applications could take advantage of the next evolution of broadband," Roberts said. Comcast engineers bonded 32 channels on the company's DOCSIS network in Chicago to deliver one billion bits per second over 11 miles of fiber and coax to the NCTA show floor.
What wasn't addressed during the demo is when home users might see such speeds, though we're sure it'll be quite a while considering their top residential plan offers 105Mbps/10Mbps for $105 a month. There was no mention of their 250GB data cap either, which we assume would have to be raised to match the increased speeds.
The CEO also took time to demonstrate the next generation of its Xfinity TV service, which will leverage cloud-based computing to provide an enhanced "Xcalibur" program guide and applications for the TV – think Facebook, traffic and weather reports and Pandora Internet radio. You can watch a demo in the video posted above.