While Comcast (CMCSA) had forecast a slowing of subscriber growth in its second quarter, the decline it’s now seeing is far worse than expected. “It is across all units,” said Roberts. We’re really not seeing a surging of disconnects. We’re just not seeing a surging of orders.”

Is that entirely econalypse-related? Or might it be due to competitive pressure from telcos? Roberts conceded that the market is an “intensely competitive one, but said Comcast has really just been dragged down by the souring economy. “I think there’s a general slowing of consumer expectations….” he said. “There are fewer opportunities to sell things.”

With U.S. broadband speeds lagging far behind European and Asian countries, Comcast is finally doing its part to bring the country’s lousy broadband Internet services into parity with those of other industrialized nations. You know, like Iceland. Or South Korea.

Comcast (CMCSA) plans to aggressively deploy its next-generation wideband service to 10 million homes by the end of the year, the company said Wednesday. Based on the ultrafast Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS), the service should provide download speeds far in excess of those currently offered by the company. It’s to be offered in two tiers. The fastest, Extreme 50, will provide up to 50 megabits per second downstream and up to 10Mbps of upstream speed. Price: $139.95/month. Ultra will get you up to 22Mbps downstream and up to 5Mbps of upstream for $62.95/month.

And what about the 150Mbps service Comcast CEO Brian Roberts demonstrated at the Cable Show last year? The one fast enough to download the entire “Encyclopedia Britannica” and “Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary” in less than four minutes? Still a ways off, apparently.

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The moves come at a time of growing institutional shareholder dissatisfaction with Comcast (CMCSA). The cable operator’s shares are down nearly 40% in the past year and off by 25% since it gave disappointing 2007 financial guidance in the fall. Suffice it to say, the company’s shareholders are not happy. In a Jan. 14 letter to Comcast, investment firm Chieftain Capital Management accused management of strategic missteps and called CEO Brian (son of Ralph) Roberts’s stewardship of the company over the past decade a Comcastrophe. “The management of this company and supervision by its board have been a ‘Comcastrophe’ for shareholders over the past decade,” Chieftain wrote. “We want and deserve the best CEO Comcast’s board of directors can find–and, based on his record, Brian Roberts is not it.”

Will the concessions Comcast has made to its shareholders silence calls for Roberts’s head? Perhaps. It’s tough to shout epithets at management when the company’s just posted a better-than-expected 54% jump in fourth-quarter net income and announced plans for its first dividend in nearly a decade.

In 2008, said Roberts, Comcast will begin upgrading its network to offer significantly faster download speeds. “Wideband takes four channels and bonds them together and will enable speeds to go up from 12 to 16 megabits a second to over 100 megabits a second,” he explained. The technology will be rolled out to “millions” by the end of this year, with more to come–”if it’s as popular as we expect,” he added.

And it undoubtedly will be. At speeds like that, Roberts noted, you could download an HD copy of “Batman Begins” in about four minutes. “Superfast movie downloads are only the beginning,” Roberts said. “This will open a whole new world of Web-based innovation.”

A few other points worth noting:

• Roberts also announced “Project Infinity,” an effort to exponentially expand its video-on-demand programming. “Comcast will put 1,000 HD choices in every Comcast HD home by the end of the year,” Roberts said. “What satellite says they’ll offer pales in comparison.”

• Comcast is now the country’s fourth largest residential phone provider.
• Finally, he pitched Fancast.com, a new online-entertainment portal that gathers film, TV and videos scattered across the Internet in one place. “It’s the content-hungry consumer’s dream,” Roberts said. “With user-generated content, there’s the possibility of millions of choices. You’ll never want to get off the couch.”

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts kicked off the Cable Show yesterday in Las Vegas with a demonstration of a DOCSIS cable modem capable of download speeds of up to 150 megabits per second–25 times faster than current models. Appearing before the National Cable & Telecommunications Association convention in Las Vegas, Roberts watched as a 32-volume set of the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Merriam-Webster Visual Dictionary were downloaded in less than four minutes. Done with a conventional cable modem, at 3 mbps to 5 mbps, the same task would have taken considerably more than three hours. “If you look at what just happened–55 million words, 100,000 articles, more than 22,000 pictures, maps and more than 400 video clips,” Roberts said, “the same download on dial-up would have taken two weeks. It really is a whole new technical platform. With wideband, we’re going to unleash a whole new generation of video, voice and data services.”

Comcast hasn’t yet set a hard date to launch the service, but Roberts said it will likely arrive at market within the next few years. “That was real. Everything you saw was real. It’s near-term,” he said. “I think it is hopefully a reminder that we have an incredible future of innovation ahead. And personally, I think broadband penetration is going to go way higher than anybody ever imagined.”