Comcast today announced that it would be the first cable internet service provider in the US to offer Internet access at 50 megabits per second, using the new DOCSIS 3.0 standard for cable internet service. Comcast will be rolling out the service in only two cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul. Comcast has already said that it will expand the network to about 20% of US cities and may increase speeds up to 100Mbps by the end of 2008. The increase in Internet speed will come at the expense of few analog stations and compression added to HD channels to make room for DOCSIS 3. The service bonds multiple cable channels together to offer increased speeds resulting in consummation of more bandwidth than earlier single channel Internet service. The DOCSIS 3.0 is very important for cable industry to compete against Verizon’s FIOS as Verizon is already offering speeds up to 30Mbps and increasing that to 100Mbps on fiber network won’t be a big challenge. The upload speeds for the new service will be just 5Mbps that is third of what FIOS (15Mbps) is offering. Comcast considers this service in luxury tier and hence charge $150/month that is around same as Verizon’s charge ($139) for its 30Mbps FIOS service.