New Xfinity Communities VP drawn by Comcast’s scale
Reprinted from SDxCentral
September 6, 2023 1:58 PM
Ilan Eframian recently joined Comcast as VP of its Xfinity Communities division, a move that he told SDxCentral provided something he did not have with similar roles at Google Fiber and Verizon: “a single word: scale.”
“Comcast is just so big,” Eframian told SDxCentral. “I didn’t really appreciate how big it was until I joined. Verizon is not a tiny company. Google’s obviously a big company but Google Fiber is very small. Xfinity is the largest provider of gigabit broadband in the U.S. … When that opportunity came up for me it was pretty easy.”
Xfinity Communities is Comcast’s division that focuses on providing broadband and cable television connectivity to multifamily properties, campus locations, apartments and mixed-use developments. Xfinity Communities currently serves approximately 200,000 properties and 15 million units.
Eframian said that Xfinity Communities is the gateway for approximately one-third of Comcast’s total broadband connection base.
“As we talk about [business-to-business] and [business-to-consumer], a lot of the Xfinity Communities’ employees work locally with properties to ensure services are great for the residents in the buildings, but also from a b2b point of view we work with owners from the biggest like the J.P. Morgan’s all the way down to the mom-and-pop’s that have a few properties,” Eframian explained.
That base relies increasingly on the operator’s “10G” service that combines its fiber for long-haul connectivity; fiber and coaxial for the “last mile” of connectivity; and then fiber, coaxial or Wi-Fi assets for the end-user access point. Comcast’s 10G service refers to the network’s ability to provide symmetrical 10 Gb/s speeds. This is based on the DOCSIS 4.0 technology standard, which Comcast started working to deploy several years ago.
“There’s various technologies … and it often depends on what’s the best fit for the property,” Eframian said. “In a new development [this is] determined in a consultative style with the developer before the property is built. For existing buildings, typically there’s existing coax there so now it’s talking about what can we do with that. Oftentimes we’ll be able to do an instant-on type service where we’ll bring the gateways into the building, have them there so that … it’s ready to go. And the gateways, they just keep innovating and innovating on these things.”