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The 2 gig rollout will be limited to 18 million homes, but Comcast says a broader 1 gig service will reach nearly everyone.

(Bloomberg Photo)

Comcast declared Friday it plans a massive Internet speed upgrade this year, offering connections up to 2 gigabits per second in 18 million homes.

That's 50 times faster than the standard broadband connection and twice as fast as Google Fiber, currently the top-end residential Internet service. Comcast's Internet service in the Portland area currently tops out at 150 megabits per second.

Comcast's core video business is under mounting pressure as new services, such as Sling TV, emerge that to offer popular subscription networks without cable TV. Meanwhile, rivals led by Google Fiber are boosting Internet speeds up to 1 gigabit per second.

The 2 gig rollout begins next month in Atlanta, a city also slated to receive Google Fiber.

Comcast is the Northwest's dominant cable TV and Internet company, with 600,000 subscribers in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Google Fiber says it's contemplating service in Portland but hasn't set a timetable for when it might begin.

The new 2 gig service will only be available to "customers that are within close proximity to our fiber network," Comcast wrote in a blog post Friday. But it's developing separate technology for a broader rollout beginning early next year that would provide speeds of at least 1 gig to "almost every customer in our footprint."

Comcast did not say when that rollout would be complete, what it will charge for the new services, or where Oregon fits into its expansion plans.

The telecom landscape is transforming rapidly as new video services move online and Internet providers race to keep up. The effects are playing out globally, and locally.

Portland has been on Google Fiber's list of potential expansion cities for more than a year, but service has apparently been held up by a thorny Oregon tax law, which could levy property taxes on the value of a telecom company's brand and other intangibles. Lawmakers are working on an exemption for gigabit service providers.

Meanwhile, Comcast, CenturyLink and Frontier have all boosted speeds in the Portland area in the past year, and CenturyLink is preparing to offer cable TV in Portland and some of its suburbs.

There are few applications that can take advantage of gigabit service today, so there's little demand -- beyond marketing power -- for a 2 gig connection. However, Google and others anticipate new online services will emerge as superfast broadband grows more prevalent.

They could enable hyper-realistic video for online conversations, full-sized video walls or Internet games. And the demands on household Internet service are growing, too, as more appliances and gadgets connect to the web and as multiple family members tap separate video streams.

-- Mike Rogoway

mrogoway@oregonian.com

503-294-7699

@rogoway