The San Mateo Chamber of Commerce and Comcast (News - Alert) announced it will upgrade the broadband network in San Mateo's downtown underground utility district.

The Digital Downtown project is the brainchild of The EDGE, an initiative of San Mateo's Chamber. The project is important as San Mateo has become a hub for dozens of tech startups. The San Mateo's Chamber is looking at overcoming obstacles to economic growth in San Mateo. 

The EDGE and Comcast, a provider advanced communication solutions, worked with downtown businesses, property owners, and city government to ensure that the project will deliver maximum benefit to downtown while minimizing any impacts to the underground utility district.

“Comcast is thrilled to be a part of this exciting and rapidly growing part of the City of San Mateo,” said Mark O'Leary, vice president of Comcast's Business Services division in Northern California, in a statement. “The San Mateo Chamber and The EDGE have been working hard to support the healthy growth of businesses in San Mateo, and they often require the kinds of broadband services that Comcast provides.”

The project will offer high-speed broadband to hundreds of businesses over optical fiber backbone. The expansion allows customers to have download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of up to 10 megabits per second. Bandwidth up to 10 gigabits per second will be available for businesses with the largest data needs, company officials said.

“We are seeing remarkable interest from businesses and venture capital to establish and grow companies in our underground utility district, and high-speed broadband is a prerequisite to establishing and growing those businesses,” said Linda Asbury, president of the San Mateo Chamber of Commerce.

Recently, township High School District 214, the second largest high school district in Illinois, selected Comcast Metro Ethernet Services to deliver cloud computing, virtualization and Web-based educational tools. Comcast's Metro Ethernet provides the capacity and bandwidth necessary to connect to IlliniCloud for 24/7 access and storage of this critical data.