This story has been updated to correct the name of Keith McCall, CEO of Enroute Systems Corp.

BUSINESS JOURNAL PHOTO | MARCUS R. DONNER

Bill Stemper, president of Comcast Business Services, based in Philadelphia, visited Pioneer Square on Tuesday to discuss broadband improvements in the neighborhood.

State-of-the-art tech companies that call Pioneer Square home finally have a broadband Internet service to keep up with their needs.

Comcast Business Class, a division of the giant consumer cable company, has completed installation of a broadband service for companies that love the ambiance of the historic downtown complex but have long deplored its poor Internet service.

Bill Stemper, president of Philadelphia-based Comcast Business Services, stopped by the square on Tuesday (Feb. 7) during a whirlwind business trip to Seattle. He said the company has already established broadband service with 20 companies in 14 buildings lining First Avenue South between Cherry and South Jackson streets – and it's negotiating with 30 more.

Comcast Business Class provides telecommunication services to business customers of all sizes, including Internet connections, networks between company facilities, voice services, and TV.

The Pioneer Square project completes a pledge that Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn made last year to bring high-speed broadband to the high-tech hub developing in Pioneer Square. He said the city would pursue a public-private partnership to get the work done, and he wrote about Comcast's progress on his blog two weeks ago .

Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn (right) speaks at an October event announcing a hiring surge by data storage company Isilon and touting Pioneer Square as a growing hub for tech companies. Looking on are Isilon president Sujal Patel (left) and Joe Tucci (center), chairman of EMC, Isilon's parent company.

In early summer, the city completed installation of a conduit partially filled with fiber optic cable to be used for civic communication, leaving room in the conduit for private vendors to install their own cable. The $60,000 project, funded partially by King Country Metro as part of the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project, hoped to attract vendors to supply ultra-high-speed Internet coverage in the 100-megabit range.

According to a Comcast spokesperson and an official with the city's Department of Information Technology, Comcast was the only company that applied for the project.

It already has at least one satisfied customer: Enroute Systems Corp., located at 616 First Ave. S. The company helps large companies ship packages from warehouses to stores; one customer, the Everett-based Zumiez sporting goods chain, transports products from a Corona, Calif., warehouse to 435 stores nationwide.

When Enroute first moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Pioneer Square in January, it was appalled to find its maximum Internet connection was 10 megabytes per second – "not sufficient in our opinion," CEO Keith McCall said. The 12-employee company, funded with angel investment, had a need for speed. Comcast's service now provides download speeds of up to 100 megabytes, though uploads are still at 10 megabytes.

"Now that Comcast made it available in such a vibrant, historical area," McCall said, "it made it possible for us to take advantage of everything Pioneer Square has to offer."

Skip Ferderber is a Mukilteo-based freelance writer. He can be reached at sferderber@gmail.com. Twitter: @SkipFerderber