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I'd like to share my experience with a similar service I've been using since year 2000 in Italy. I have a symmetrical 10 Mbits fiber optic connection from Fastweb http://www.fastweb.it/. Their offers that can compare to the Verizon one range in the 50-60 Euros per month, so Verizon is definitely cheaper.
The question somebody asked, directly or unspoken, in this forum is: do you really get all that speed? In my case the answer is yes. I FTP at 1000 kB/s (kilobytes) with the other guys in the Fastweb network and it's common to download files at more than 400 kB/s from US servers. CDNs usually bring that figure in the 700-900 kB/s range. That bandwidth isn't guaranteed by the contract but it never shrunk noticeably in these eight years, despite the fact that the customer base grew 100 times or more. On the other side, none of the 10 or 20 Mb/s ADSL connections I saw here in Italy (with other ISPs) were faster than one tenth of their nominal bandwidth, when downloading files from the same services I use.
So, if you trust your provider to invest in its interconnection with the Internet at large, those 65$ can be worth the expense. If you think that it will somewhat cap your bandwidth, stay with what you have. In my case I got a six-months-for-free offer and I jumped in at the very beginning of the offering :-) but otherwise I'd have waited some month and read what the other customers said.
Finally, do you really need all that speed? My answer is yes: you find a way to put it at use once you got it and you don't want to go back.

I heared that in Italy you can get a T1 for cheap, but I'm sure it comes with no guarantee.

Notice that fiber to the premises has been an option in many urban areas of Italy for the past five years - http://www.fastweb.it/ is the provider. They are famous for the good quality of the connectivity, and notorious for the unpredictability of the setup times. Once you are in, it is good, but it can take ages to get in. A flat rate connection will cost about 40 Euro per month, including 100 Minutes of VoIP and a three-port hub.

Just two countries who came (late) to the IPTV revolution.
France (Freebox and Wanadoo)
Italy (Fastweb)
These are examples of where IPTV is really booming. Others can point out to Korea or Japan who, as usual, have been the firt to jump into the fray, but in any case the implementation of these IPTV providers in these countries has by no means been hampered by the lack of content
If my experience with Freebox is any proof, any content can be shown, so if at three o'clock in the morning I am watching indiscriminately a show on the French gaming channel (yay Game One!) or discovering the intiricacies of rectal palpation of cows in Belgrade as shown on some eastern european tv which is in the free basic offer of my IPTV, I can assure you the lack of quality content is by no means the same as lack of content. IPTV will be filled with practically every useless tv show on earth

There is also a `set top box` version as well, which has been used in some, interesting products such as FastWeb in italy. This an ISP who has fibre into homes who is pushing a video communication solution.

It really depends on your planning timescale. For the next few years, you are correct. However, in the future you will see the price of really high-rate connectivity drop, and then fiber will come into its own. At that point, your "chunk of coax" will have to be replaced.

But, you may ask, is now the right time to install that fiber leading into your home?

If you believe (as many do) that a financially viable FTTH system is impossible at this time, check out
Fastweb, a FTTH provider in Italy. They are currently providing all-optical broadband service in Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna, and Genoa. In the USA, things are happening much more slowly, but there are already
70 communities with FTTH service, and lots more considering or planning it.

If you want to hold onto your "chunk of coax" based on today's pricing of telecommunications equipment and services, go right ahead. However, be aware that a full life-cycle cost comparison might already come out in favor of fiber, and the long-term trends are clearly in favor of fiber.

A company called Fastweb wired most of Milan with fiber optic. I have a 10 Mb/sec connection at home, with unlimited calls to phone in Italy (no cell phones) at 85 euro/month. Without unlimited calls (just connection) it's 67 euro/month.
I also have it in my office too, though it costs more.
These are very competitive prices in Italy, but other companies offer just at most a 640K/sec ADSL.
And it's fast: it's full 10 Mb/sec in the MAN, and there is a p2p network with 1000s of hosts in which a full movie is downloaded in about 15-20 minutes.
In the rest of the Internet the connection is very fast, even if much less than the MAN. I generally download at 200K/sec from a decent server.
Almost everybody I know who uses Internet and can (some areas are not wired) has Fastweb.
There are some drawbacks: some problems with mail servers, no public nor static ip and other things. But you forget anything when you look at the speed of the connection :)

If you live Italy, in one of the following cities:
Milan and province, Rome, Turin, Bologna, Naples and Genoa, thanks to FastWeb you can get 10Mbit optical fiber Internet access for about $70/mo (67 euros/mo).

Quite cheap and works like a charm :-)

I mean 10Mbps! VoIP ipTV VoD nPVR ...

...but no in my area. I have to pay 40 Eur/month for a lame ADSL. Damn monopolists!

I just don't understand the use of it in a home setting? I already have my cellphone with free long distance.

Free international? I doubt it. The article expressly talks about a call from Japan to NYC

I live in Italy and we have a 10 mpbs internet connection with fastweb which includes unlimited local and national calling. It's all voip without a noticable depreciation in vox quality.

.... this is the technology, but well, where is the service provider? And how much they are going to charge? Honestly, if this really gives you satelite+cable TV, 3 phone lines and 10BaseT, I'm willing to pay up to $300 a month for it.

In some areas of Italy there's Fastweb which offers for 75 EUR (~66 USD) a month Cable TV, local and national phone calls and Internet connection. Their mother company, eBiscom, has wired Milan and some other big italian cities with some very high speed fibers. I live in an area without coverage but from some friends who have it I've heard it's pretty good. Here you can find some informations in english, enjoy!

Andrea

Some of us already have it.

http://www.fastweb.it

10 mbps to the home. :)

The only downside is that the router is a total blackbox for a gateway/router. Portscanning it from either side of the firewall reveals nothing and there seems no way into it to configure port-forwarding...

The gateway device Fastweb is using is here: telsey. Any ideas on how to make this thing more, erm, functional... would be appreciated.

The other terrific thing about the Fastweb service is that with our monthly tarrif, we also get 'free' national and local calls. They also gave some crazy webTV appliance (which runs linu, btw) but we don't have much use for it.