Comcast: We'll step up SMB, mid-sized services

Comcast has a $2 billion a year business focused on selling to companies with less than 20 employees. Now it plans to move upstream to larger companies.

Michael Angelakis, Comcast CFO, said at a Citi investment conference that it can grow its SMB business substantially. He said:

We identified a segment of the market which is commercial businesses that are less than 20 employees. These are relatively small businesses, doctor office, dentist office, lawyers, restaurants, hair salons, whatever within our footprint. And the goal was really to go into those businesses and offer a business services type of product that would include, say, multiple telephone lines. It would include the high-speed data service that we have, which typically they may have DSL or ISDN or maybe even a T-1, but our service is far better than each of those services. And also we may offer a video service for the lawyer in his office or in the waiting room or so forth.

Now that business is worth $2 billion and Angelakis said the total market could be $10 billion to $15 billion.

The next move for Comcast will be focusing on midsized businesses---250 to 500 employees. Comcast has deployed metro Ethernet technology as well as voice systems. "In 2012 we don't expect a lot of revenue to come from that, but we have a business plan, and the team has proven what they can do on the small side," said Angelakis.