Picture a packed sandwich shop on a storm-thick Florida afternoon. The card reader blinks, then the internet dies. Ten minutes later the lunch crowd is gone, and the owner’s day is four figures lighter. That gut-punch happens statewide whenever bandwidth hiccups.
For Florida SMBs, internet service is the cash register, inventory, security feed, and sales funnel in one. Most addresses default to Comcast Business, but newcomer WOW! Business is threading fresh fiber through Central Florida—offering symmetrical speeds at starter budgets.
Which connection keeps your revenue flowing when the rain bands roll in? We’ll compare coverage, speed, price, reliability, and support so you can choose with confidence.
Availability and coverage in Florida
Pull up a Florida road map and pin every address Comcast Business can serve—you would all but wallpaper the state.
Decades of franchise deals and recent rural grants let the cable giant reach everything from downtown Miami towers to tomato farms outside Immokalee. For most ZIP codes, availability is a formality; Comcast is there.
WOW! takes a surgical approach. The company once touched only parts of Pinellas County and the western Panhandle. In late 2023 it named Central Florida a key market and started laying new fiber through Seminole and Orange counties. By November, crews had already lit Casselberry, Forest City, and Altamonte Springs, with Lake Mary and Winter Garden next.
The difference is stark. Comcast owns the legacy plant you inherit, while WOW!’s fiber appears street by street over the next 12 months. Run both address checkers first. If WOW! returns “not yet,” Comcast wins on coverage.
Where footprints overlap, the story flips. WOW!’s builds are fully buried fiber, but many Comcast lines ride aerial poles that catch hurricane debris. A boutique in Altamonte Springs can now choose between older coax and a fresh symmetrical gigabit circuit protected underground.
Farther out, the roles reverse. State grants fund Comcast trunks into more than 40 lightly populated counties once limited to DSL or nothing. WOW!’s crews are unlikely to trench those dirt roads soon.
Bottom line: geography rules. Start with your exact address, not a marketing claim. If both providers say yes, keep reading. If only one does, your coverage question is settled.
Speed and network technology
Standard packages start at 300 Mbps symmetrical and scale to 5 Gbps; the provider’s Fiber internet for businesses overview even lists dedicated circuits topping out at 10 Gbps for offices that push huge files around the clock.
Comcast hybrid horsepower and the next big leap
Comcast routes most Florida business traffic through a hybrid fiber-coax grid. Fiber feeds neighborhood nodes, then coax finishes the sprint to your modem. Today that design delivers 1.25–2 Gbps downloads while uploads hover near 35 Mbps in many ZIP codes.
In May 2024 the company boosted entry tiers from 100 to 300 Mbps and raised upstream lanes statewide at no extra cost. It also launched full-duplex trials that push multi-gigabit uploads and downloads over the same coax strand, bringing true symmetry to select Florida markets.
For your shop, a one-gig plan on a tuned node behaves like fiber during cloud backups and 4K streams. On legacy gear you still enjoy faster downloads, but uploads remain capped. Comcast aims to roll DOCSIS 4.0 across the state by late 2025, a roadmap that keeps coax competitive for business internet speed in Florida while fiber builds catch up.
WOW! all-fiber burst of symmetry
Where Comcast refines an older engine, WOW! arrives with brand-new fiber to the premises across Central Florida. Light moves equally in both directions, so a 1 Gbps subscription sends files to the cloud just as fast as it pulls them down, eliminating the upload choke that designers and camera-heavy retailers feel on cable.
Standard packages start at 300 Mbps symmetrical and scale to 5 Gbps, with 10 Gbps dedicated circuits available. Latency sits near single-digit milliseconds, keeping Teams calls crisp even when colleagues upload 4K product shots.
Not every historic WOW! zone has upgraded; parts of Pinellas still rely on coax capped around 40 Mbps upstream. Ask plainly during the sales call: is my address fiber or cable? A fiber response unlocks the state’s most affordable path to gig-class symmetry.
Side by side, Comcast offers the widest set of download tiers and a clear path to symmetry once DOCSIS 4.0 reaches your block. WOW! provides fewer choices, yet every tier is uncorked upstream from day one. Choose based on workflow: if your team ships data out as often as it pulls it in, symmetrical fiber is pure oxygen.
Plans, pricing, and the contract fine print
Walk into either provider’s store and you see billboard numbers like $44.99 or $74.99. The sticker covers only year one. Smart budgeting tracks costs through month 24 along with any hidden fees.
Comcast: low intro, long leash
Comcast Business offers a 300 Mbps promo around $75 when you accept a 36-month commitment. Once month 13 arrives, the rate often rises into the mid-90s and tops $100 in year three. Early-termination fees equal every remaining month, so leaving a two-year deal six months early on a $120 plan leaves a $720 charge. Add equipment rental at about $18 per month and small surcharges, and the bill climbs quickly for business internet pricing in Florida.
WOW!: shorter term, clearer math
WOW! leads with a 12-month contract and a 24-month price lock in new fiber markets. The 600 Mbps tier costs $54.99 during year one, then moves to $74.99. Installation is free, and the modem is free for the first three months. Even after the price change, the two-year total ends roughly $1,200 below a comparable Comcast plan, according to 2025 published quotes. Because the commitment is half as long, early-exit exposure stays smaller—think hundreds rather than thousands.
What the math shows
- WOW! 600 Mbps fiber, gear included, about $1,650 over two years
- Comcast 500 Mbps coax, promo plus modem rent, about $2,865 over two years
That $1,200 gap could fund an LTE fail-over router or monthly team pizza.
Reliability, uptime, and staying open when the lights flicker
Florida storms love to swat power poles and flood parking lots. An internet link that looks perfect on a clear Tuesday can fail the moment the first squall line rolls through. We judge providers on two things: how often service drops and how quickly it returns.
Comcast leans on scale. A statewide network operations center watches every node around the clock, and during hurricanes the company stages generators, spare cable, and dozens of bucket trucks just outside the cone. Business circuits sit higher in the repair queue than residential lines, and a paid add-on called Connection Pro activates a 4G router and battery within seconds of an outage. The company advertises 99.9 percent annual uptime and a four-hour mean time to repair, setting a high bar for business internet reliability in Florida.
WOW! counters with simplicity. New fiber is buried rather than hung, so wind and falling limbs pose less threat from the start. Local crews live where they work, and some customers leave installs with the technician’s cell number on the work order. The company does not bundle LTE failover, yet the shorter plant and lighter bureaucracy often lead to quick fixes for single-site problems.
Which model fits depends on your risk tolerance. If every minute offline drains revenue, Comcast’s formal SLA and turnkey backup provide a safety net, though the extras cost more. If your team can ride out a rare hiccup and prefers fewer monthly charges, WOW!’s buried glass and personal touch keep life simple.
No matter the provider, the smartest Florida SMBs add a belt-and-suspenders plan: a fiber or coax workhorse plus an inexpensive cellular hotspot ready to take over when storms arrive.
Customer service and the human factor
Internet speed is only half the story. When something breaks, you want answers without a phone-menu maze.
Comcast runs support like a Fortune 100 help desk. Calls route through national centers before reaching the business queue, where Tier-1 agents follow a set script. Escalations move quickly once a ticket reaches the regional team, and the Comcast Business mobile app lets you reboot gear or check outage maps from your phone. Surveys place Xfinity at 67 out of 100 on the 2025 ACSI index, slightly above most cable peers.
WOW! trades polish for familiarity. Support desks sit in the states it serves, and hold times often stay under a minute outside storm events. Customers in Pinellas and Seminole counties report talking to the same rep twice or receiving a follow-up text from the installer who ran the drop. ACSI numbers rank WOW! a few points below Comcast, yet many small-business owners prefer the first-name approach.
Which style fits your team comes down to preference. If you enjoy self-service dashboards, automated diagnostics, and a clear escalation ladder, Comcast feels reassuring for business internet customer support in Florida. If you like calling one local number and hearing, “Hey, Mark, how’s the printer shop today?” WOW! delivers that coffee-shop vibe.
Post the support line next to the modem. Fast access beats any service script when lunchtime customers are waiting.
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