LIVERMORE — Comcast will begin offering Bay Area residential customers internet access on Wednesday that’s four times faster than its previous top-speed service, for $10 more a month.

Comcast customers will be able to receive 1-gigabit-per-second internet service for just under $160 a month, the cable giant said Wednesday. Previously, for just under $150 a month, customers could receive web service that topped out at 250 megabits per second.

“These are much faster speeds that will be available to a much broader audience” for nearly the same price, said Elaine Barden, a regional vice president of sales and marketing in Comcast California’s Livermore headquarters.

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Watch: Southern California’s Bobcat wildfire fire progression in time-lapse videos Normally, when surfing the web, the typical residential customer might not notice that big of an increase in speed. But Comcast said the 1-gigabit speeds will be a factor when streaming or downloading movies or televisions shows, or some other big video packets.

For conventional data speeds, it might take about 15 to 25 minutes to download a 2-hour movie in high definition. With the new gigabit service, however, Comcast said it would be possible to download a 600-megabyte show in 4 seconds, a 5-gigabyte movie in 40 seconds, a 150-megabyte movie in 2 seconds, and a 15-gigabyte game in two minutes.

Comcast serves about 4 million homes in Northern California.

“We are really trying to hit a sweet spot with the great majority of folks in Northern California and the Bay Area,” Barden said.

The specific price is $159.95 a month for the new service.

“We don’t need to come into your home to do this,” said Jenny Gendron, a spokeswoman for Comcast. “If you have a cable modem already, you can hook it up yourself. It is seamless.”

By employing a new technology, Comcast says it won’t have to retrofit its existing infrastructure.

“We can deliver this on our current fiber system,” Barden said. “We don’t have to dig up streets. We don’t have to mess up flower gardens.”

Comcast said it will deliver 1-gigabit web service in all of the cities it serves in the nine-county Bay Area, except for portions of Los Gatos.

In surrounding communities, areas where the 1-gigabit services won’t be available include: Santa Cruz, Scotts Valley, Rio Vista, Lodi, Ukiah, Willits, Mendocino, Fort Bragg, Citrus Heights, Sacramento, Elk Grove, Folsom, McClellan Air Force Base, Rancho Cordova, Lathrop and Manteca. It also won’t be available in the Gold Country communities of Cool, Georgetown, Sutter Creek, Amador, San Andreas, Angels Camp, Arnold, Jackson, Plymouth, Sonora and Tuolumne County.

The new technologies also mean Comcast is looking for new workers.

“We are hiring 150 people now in California, and 70 percent of those hires are in the Bay Area,” Barden said. “The improvements we are making in the customer experience will lead to employee job growth.”