Beginning with next month, Comcast’s Wideband service which offers 50 Mbit/s (that’s 6.25 MByte/s) will be expanded to Oregon and southwest Washington State.

The cable and internet provider first introduced wideband in Minneapolis-St. Paul at the start of this year, and afterwards extended it to Boston, southern New Hampshire, and parts of Philadelphia and New Jersey in October.

Wideband, which is also known as DOCSIS 3.0, will be provided in two tiers for residential customers. The flavours are Ultra and Extreme 50. Ultra users will get up to 22 Mbits/s download speed and up to 5 Mbits/s upload speed for 62.95 a month. The upper tier, Extreme 50, will give users 50 Mbits/s download speed and 10 Mbits/s upload for the more costly $139.95 a month. These ‘residential’ prices apply to customers of Comcast’s cable service only, though.

"These speeds are only a preview of what's to come--in the future we'll have the capability to deliver even faster speeds in excess of 160 Mbps," Curt Henninger, senior vice president of Comcast Oregon and SW Washington, said in a statement.

Comcast is also planning to increase the speeds of current residential customers. Performance tier customers will have their download and upload speeds doubled, putting these at 12 Mbit/s and 2 Mbit/s respectively. Performance Plus customers will also be upgrade to Comcast’s Blast tier, which affords speeds of 16 Mb/s when downloading and 2 Mb/s when uploading.

In spite of the new speeds, Comcast’s bandwidth use limits are still in place. Users who don’t stay within 250 GB of downloads per month will face a one-year suspension upon the second offense.