Verizon Announces FTTP Prices

ffejie writes "C|NET News.com is reporting that Verizon has announced its pricing on Fiber-to-the-Premises - it 'will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service', and more if bought on its own. The high speed internet service, dubbed Verizon Fios, brings speeds up to 30 Mbps to the home. FTTP could lead to a sweeping change, especially in the television industry. According to News.com: 'Verizon is considered the furthest along with its fiber plans. It reiterated on Monday its goal of reaching 1 million homes and offices by the end of the year...' It looks as if FTTP is coming to the masses."

Comments

Can the backbones handle it?

[digitalvengeance]

From the article:

A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans.

That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection. I wonder how many of these will roll out as people like me jump to them before the major internet infrastructure starts to suffer? I mean, think of it: end point capacity could literally be upgraded by a factor of 10 in some areas. Will the backbones and their major tributaries be able to handle it?

Either way, I am looking forward to it.

Josh.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[neilcSD]

Very good point. Let's hope that their infrastructure is robust enough to handle the swarms of consumers and businesses who are going to sign up for this. It would be a shame for this venture to fail because they didn't think things through. Best of luck to them though, I for one will sign up!

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sweden's internet infrastructure seems to hold up well, despite all the public DC hubs and torrent trackers camping on it!

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[G27 Radio]

People bring this up everytime some company announces a large-scale rollout of high-speed like this. My guess is the same thing will happen this time. Their customers will have 30Mbps to the home, but will only see that kind of speed on things cached close by, and get the same speed as the rest of us broadband users on everything else. That is, until the backbones are upgraded. I don't think we'll see the backbones "suffer" though.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Lord Kano]

That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection.

Dude, you are getting molested. Seriously, I'd suggest pricing out some alternatives.

LK

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Vellmont]

I think the key is that useage of the added capacity will grow more slowly. Sure some people will have p2p apps that soak up a lot of bandwidth, but the majority of people won't use up all that capacity right away. It'll take time for people to find uses for all the extra capacity. So at least in theory the growth of the backbones can happen more slowly.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[digitalvengeance]

I wish I could find an alternative, but its the only provider in the small town where I live. Honestly, its not much of a concern as the bill is actually covered by the company I work full-time for. They simply don't mind that I also use it for consulting work after hours.

Is the price really that bad, though? It includes a static IP (admittedly a cheap addition), but we have offices that pay twice as much for T1 based solutions that don't perform at the same level.

Josh.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[peragrin]

That's like saying the entire internet runs at 56k just cause that's the speed the majority of us connect at.

No If you have a 30Mbps net connection you will rarely use it to it's full strength for some time. Possibly if you are doing Video communications will you use it up. It's more than enough for a small business website. It's more than enough current tasks.

As such ISP's will have time to upgrade the backbones to Internet II when it is needed.

In the future though I see a single communication line coming into your home. Off of abox installed in your house will come TV, Internet, and video Phone. Possibly using interchanged monitors.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[tekiegreg]

Ummmm from my understanding the Internet II project is only a university funded gig...you'll never surf the Internet II unless you are involved with a major university in some way...

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Senzei]

Yeah, because, you know, all those universities don't have any problems with students finding ways to use all of their bandwidth. Especially on a private computer, people will find a way. P2P apps are agressive enough to do it, and the big fat pipe will make running those nonstop all the more appealing. Unless they start out with budgets for 60-70% usage/bandwidth sold they are going to have problems.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[homer_ca]

"$210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection"

Are there any restrictions on your small business service like running servers or reselling service? Residential broadband service has those restrictions plus upstream bandwidth is shared with other customers. You know it's shared and oversubscribed because they reserve the right to disconnect bandwidth hogs. That $210 is a third the price of a T1. With that you usually get a block of 15 IPs and no restrictions on servers, reselling service, or monthly usage caps.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Luke-Jr]

My college is quite small (~1000 students) and still had Internet II. We dropped it for another connection a few months ago, though... Nobody actually used the InetII features (though had I known we had it, I might have).

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it really is that bad.

http://1staccess.ca/ is the company I'm with. I get 3Mbps down, 800Kbps up, 20GB/mo for CDN$30/mo. For CDN$4/mo I also have a static IP.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[strictnein]

I get 3Mbps down, 800Kbps up, 20GB/mo for CDN$30/mo

20GB/mo?

That really really sucks.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Martin Blank]

What about all the dark fiber that was laid down in the late 90's in anticipation of the big boom? Was that all a myth, or is it just waiting to be used by the creditors that took possession after the crash?

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[digitalvengeance]

It has very few restrictions. No bandwidth caps, no prohibition on servers or the like, just the usual anti-spam policies (if I spam, they reserve the right to block port 25) etc.

All in all, I think its worth the cost, but I might feel differently if it were coming out of my paycheck.

Josh.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[cmacb]

"In the future though I see a single communication line coming into your home. Off of abox installed in your house will come TV, Internet, and video Phone. Possibly using interchanged monitors."

Right!

And the game to watch is which of your existing services falls by the wayside. The DSL/Cable battle is just the first round. First company to put fiber in my house wins!

Next phase will be to eliminate current ridiculous bandwidth restrictions on servers because it will be more trouble to measure than the accounting costs are worth. Everyone can finally host their own unrestricted internet server. A lot of the smaller hosting companies will be put out of our misery by this and the only companies remaining will be those that need a room full of equipment to handle the demands of the large, popular domains, Google, MS, Yahoo and the like.

Net-centric computing will have finally arrived, and it will no longer be worth saving video, music, or even your own spreadsheet and text files on your local hard drive as they can be instantly downloaded from a server somewhere that is getting backed up regularly. In other words, current hosting companies will have the chance to transition from points of presence to storage, archiving, and application server facilities.

This will all demand an end to the nonsense of operating systems which can be easily hacked into. Microsoft will replace the Windows underpinnings transparently with something that is standards based (probably BSD variant), but Linux will continue to thrive for those who want to have complete control over what they do with their own hardware.

As the rest of the world tries to copy the connectivity nirvana achieved here in the US the world will enter a new era of peace and prosperity, except that all help-desk call centers the world over will still transfer to someplace in India...

And then I woke up.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

For normal people, I would disagree. For most slashdotters, I can see this this would seriously curtail your pr0n intake.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a home-based business.. I never even *look* at the crap from Verizon, BellSouth etc. The restrictions are enormous. They can shut you off for "excessive bandwidth" which *they* define. They block ports. They don't allow multiple machines, they make you install their IdiotWare(tm) [I don't need it on my FreeBSD/Mac network, thanks], they only give you one IP address (dynamic, usually), sometimes they insert transparent proxies on port 80, the terms disallow VPNs, the customer support treats you like a dumb consumer, etc., etc. To add insult to injury, some folks (like roadrunner) don't even OFFER business class to homes.

My business-class SDSL has a SLA and when I need technical support I get it, and no BS restrictions.

There's a reason business class costs so much more, and believe me, it is worth it... stick with what you have unless you want a long, arbitrary TOS hanging over your head, ready to pull your service at any time for one of 50 reasons.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[webteeth]

Is that $210 a monthly fee?

Even when this service is released, I am perfectly content with my 10 Mbps connection I have right now. I only pay about $70 bucks for the internet bundled with digital cable

http://www.cogeco.ca/en/hsi_pack_o.html

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[TykeClone]

I'm sure that no viruses will cause problems with that kind of bandwith to spew out copies of themselves.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[secret agent]

FIOS spelled backwards is SOIF, which in french means THIRST. And we know that when the french are thirsty they drink EVIAN, which spelled backwards is NAIVE, which is what you are if you think FIOS will be coming to your home anytime soon, leaving you THIRSTY for bandwidth. .,.By the way FIOS is portuguese for WIRES, which is the wrong name for a fiber network.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[0racle]

You mean like the swarms and swarms of people that signed up for DSL and cable when it became available? It didn't happen then, it wont happen now, how do you justify $50/month to receive e-mail.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[strictnein]

well... if i'm streaming music from a 128kpbs shoutcast server that's ~13KB/sec for about 2 hours a day (which I do most days), that's over 30GB right there. Not to mention game demos, Linux releases, and other crap. I've done 15-20GB of legal downloads in one day.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[caino59]

210 for 3Mb/1Mb

damn...

makes m doubly happy with my 6/768 connection from speakeasy for 100....

but this 15/30 down thing looks very sweet...

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[jhagler]

You're off by a factor of ten.

13000 * 60 * 60 * 2 * 30 = 2,808,000,000 = 2.8 GB

My ISP lets you select your rate based on how much data you expect to transfer, the speed is between my telco and me. I am currently on a 10 GB a month plan and I usually come within 1 GB of that. And yes, I download ISO's, stream a couple of internet radio stations, and download lots of other stuff. 15-20 GB of downloads in one day is definitely an extreme and far from being your average user, hell most users probably don't exceed more than 2-3 GB/month.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[afidel]

No, they aren't. I have up to 4.5Mbps available for DL (only 1Mbps up though) and P2P never comes close to saturating it. Whether that is from traffic shaping from my ISP I do not know. All I know is I often saturate it using tradition FTP or DCC but none of the P2P apps has come close.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

"No If you have a 30Mbps net connection you will rarely use it to it's full strength for some time. Possibly if you are doing Video communications will you use it up. It's more than enough for a small business website. It's more than enough current tasks."

Um, it's called BitTorrent...

And it's OK for current tasks only because we only currently do stuff that will fit down a meager half-megabit pipe. The only thing stopping decent quality (streaming) video over IP right now is bandwidth, given 100% home gigabit (for headroom and multiple streams) coverage I think video on demand would get big quite fast.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[dmayle]

Um... Yeah... Dark Fiber... That's a bunch of fiber optic lines running along railroads (mostly), that doesn't have equipment on either end. The backbone isn't the problem. If one of the major provider's is low on bandwidth, they can just upgrade the current equipment they've got. (Fiber has so much available capacity, that when you want to upgrade, you normally just replace the sender/receiver, and the repeaters, and you suddenly have more available.) It's cheaper to upgrade the equipment than to lay new lines/

As to the dark lines in place? Backbone isn't the problem. It's the fact that no one can afford more than a single twisted pair to the office/home since laying fiber is so expensive. I've got a friend who works at an office where the building is lit up (which means fiber is run to the building and in use), and each company has 100Mbit ethernet to the fiber equipment, and a guarantee that the company has at least that much bandwidth (per customer) to all of it's peering points.

That's the power available with fiber. Once everyone's got that kind of connection, we'll see a sudden leap, from 256Kbps or 1Mbit up to 15, 30, 50, 100. Look at how far we've stretched copper already, and we're at the extreme end of what it can do. We're only at the beginning of fiber, and once you get it to your home, the service levels will increase much faster than lines do today.

Kinda makes me want to move back to the U.S... (though not if I have to live in Texas... ;)

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[thpr]

There IS still a portion of dark fiber lying around. Or so says The Fiber Optic Association.

Note the linked article refers to "FTTH" - Fiber to the Home. Which isn't really much different than "FTTP" - Fiber to the Premises, other than it's limited to home and not business (hence the recent change to analysts using FTTP).

Unfortunately, it's not like a light switch. It's more like saying the house is wired for electricity, but you don't own any lamps. A LOT of capital equipment in the form of Routers and Optical Switches will need to be purchased to make the "dark" fiber into usable fiber.

Watch the results of Nortel, in particular, as it has a strong North America optical presence.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Ian Wolf]

I swear I heard trumpets, harps, and the Angels singing. I got all glassy eyed and was begining to think the Messiah had returned and cmacb was his name.

And then I woke up.

Not since my sister uttered the words, "There is no Santa Claus" had five words crushed my hopes and dreams so utterly.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[the_2nd_coming]

sorry, my hard drive is still gonna be faster than a network connection. but backup solutions would be nice.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Sukh]

When I was living in University accommodation, I had a 100mbit ethernet connection to the web. Of that, the maximum I ever uploaded on P2P was 6000KBytes/sec. The maximum I ever downloaded at (on P2P networks) was 500KBytes/sec. The maximum constant speed was 100KBytes/sec and even then, it wasn't that often.

I just don't know where all my upstream went... Damn leechers.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[peragrin]

Internet I was a darpa, then University gig. Today anyone an connect. What starts as a science project can morph into a life changing event that affects everybody. electricity, Telephones, Nuclear, Airplanes, Helicopters, Rockets, Transistors, computers all of them are just science projects.

Some funded by universities, Some by goverment, some are independant.

All of them are just projects.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[mplex]

Most of that fiber was between cities rather than in them. Metro fiber networks are just starting to come of age, as issues such as right of way, expense, termination costs, and number of existing utilities in the streets to avoid have made it very expensive (neighborhoods are different).

As for all the dark fiber (something as high as 90% of it), these lines were installed with the future in mind. If you are going through all the work to lay a cable with 12 strands in it, you make as well bump it up to 800 strands since the majority of the cost in laying the fiber is elsewhere.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[klui]

Cable companies like Comcast will place restrictions on UL/DL, but DSL companies like SBC do not. I avoid Cable ISPs.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Martin Blank]

Right, but the question that I was asking was in reference to the backbone, not the connections to the home.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[thpr]

The article I linked was talking about the backbone. I only provided the "FTTH" clarification to help those without the magical-telecom decoder ring since the article references it as a potential driver of higher bandwidth requirements (and the application that would likely "dry up" the dark fiber... someday :)

While we're on the distinction, the connections to the home/premises will probably be done with passive optical networking (PON) which isn't a place where there is any entrenched supplier (so my reference to Nortel in my first post was in relation to the backbone)

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

It still applies, even more so than for consumer level connections. With the astronomically expensive hardware, they can multiplex what can only be described as simply insane amounts of bandwidth, with each year seeing yet another increase. Unless something changes drastically, it might be many years before the only way to increase bandwidth would be to light dark fiber, or lay more.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[drinkypoo]

How much is really along railroads and unused? I know that Qwest got started because - and my memory is hazy here but essentially this is the story - someone worked for the largest railroad, and while they worked there they set up the ability for a company to buy the rights to lay services along the railroad. Then he went and spun up qwest, or joined up with them or something, and bam! They had more fiber capacity crossing the country than all the other major U.S. providers put together. Of course, then they had to actually do something with it.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[lovswr]

The backbone will be fine. As an example, my company recenlty negotiated a OC-192 with Verizon at the Broad St Telecom Hotel in NYC. They waived the 24000 install fee & all maint fees for 2 years. That breaks down to less than 1000 per OC-N. Why did they do it? Becuase off all of the dark fiber that they & other facilities based carries have in the CONUS. Teh problem, as always, will be the last mile. In this case the B/W issue will be solved. The time it takes them to get to YOUR house will be a bitch.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[lovswr]

ummm no. The railroads had thier own internal networks Also most large power concerns did this as well. Since they already had the rights of way, this was a "free" way for them to monitor their own "netowrks" (rail & power lines). USWest (now Qwest) was the first RBOC to lease that "right of way" from a railroad & run fiber alongside the tracks. The largest owner of "railway fiber: nowadays is Level 3. They got most of it from MCI/Worldcomm.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[bluGill]

Not this old myth again...

All that "dark fiber" was never intended to be lit up. The cost to lay 1000 fiber lines is nearly the same as the cost to lay 1. Only a fool would not put in 1000 (exact amounts depending on what your supplier will give you) while they are at it. No extra cost (significant), and your odds are much higher that at least 1 line will survive the process if you have that many.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well so far this month I'm up too 37.18gb down and 41.09 up. Guess I'm not much of an average user.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[ces]

Net-centric computing will have finally arrived, and it will no longer be worth saving video, music, or even your own spreadsheet and text files on your local hard drive as they can be instantly downloaded from a server somewhere that is getting backed up regularly. In other words, current hosting companies will have the chance to transition from points of presence to storage, archiving, and application server facilities.

This will all demand an end to the nonsense of operating systems which can be easily hacked into. Microsoft will replace the Windows underpinnings transparently with something that is standards based (probably BSD variant), but Linux will continue to thrive for those who want to have complete control over what they do with their own hardware.

I think the demands of content owners like the RIAA and MPAA for some sort of DRM and policing of copyright violations will keep this from taking off as you predict as well as give me an incentive to keep a local copy of all my files.

In addition there are the privacy concerns, I don't exactly want John Ashcroft to be doing fishing expeditions against data I choose to store simply becuase he feels like it. At least with data on my own hard drives I have a pretty good idea if the FBI has been by to have a look. If I store everything on google's "Gdrive" I may never know until I'm dissapeared to the Gitmo if somebody's been snooping.

Also there is a memory-hole problem. I often save local copies of news stories or other interesting web pages. All too often I will return to a story or site later and find it either gone or altered. My most recent encounter with this was the USGS high-resolution color aerial photograph database. Photos of the White House, US Naval Observatory (the VP's Residence), and US Capitol building are blurred. In addition many road and rail bridges have had small blacked out areas added along side them. Sometimes it is something as simple as someone taking down a personal page for whatever reason.

Thanks but I'll keep the master copy of my data local for now

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[null-sRc]

$210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps

jebus!

i've been paying 65 CDN$ per month for 2.5mbps/1.0mbps for almost 7 years now... :|

glad I live in vancouver...

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Afrosheen]

What he (the parent poster above yours) was trying to say is what I've seen a million times already. Basically, there's a critical mass speed that the majority of 'big sites' have preset. I was on an unlimited wireless connection before, and could pull down well over 10MB/sec at any given time, with unlimited throughput for uploading as well.

The problem I saw time and time again was that nobody could feed me enough bandwidth to max out my connection. I never knew what top speed it was capable of because nobody could serve me faster than around 10MB/sec which is the fastest I ever saw it, and this was from leeching 15 sites at once.

Generally, most big file shops (fileplanet, gamespy, download.com) have QOS and bandwidth limiting in effect on their routers. They all started doing this when broadband became more common to make more of their measley bandwidth available to more simultaneous users. When you have 100 people leeching from you on cable at 500KB/sec you start sweating, and choke them down. Ultimately everyone started charging for leeching services.

I don't see this attitude changing, and fiber to the curb, with widespread adoption and availability, will only exasperate the problem further. They thought it was bad when people got cable and dsl...just wait until the leechers can leech orders of magnitudes faster.

Then again, those with privileged upstreams tend to serve and share..so maybe there will be a balance point eventually. I still think a sort of Bittorrent-ish webserver app needs to hit the mainstream and run as a background service on broadband-enabled computers to prevent slashdottings.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Spy Hunter]

I'll bet you anything it will be 30 Mbps down, 768 Kbps up. They wouldn't want you to actually be able to *use* your connection for anything, that would be bad for business.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[mollymoo]

sorry, my hard drive is still gonna be faster than a network connection

Are you sure? Gigabit ethernet is already faster than most hard drives sold today. You need a Raptor or a RAID array to beat it. And that's over copper.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[sekzscripting]

Uh. Yeah, p2p apps soaking up all the bandwidth. I think harddrive prices are going to have to drop A LOT for p2p apps to 'soak it all up'.

This is the obvious fault in your statement, in theory people will download millions and millions of files constantly. BUT WHERE ARE THEY GOING TO STORE IT?

I don't think any college kid or ANYONE ELSE for that matter, is going to spend $150+ every minute (if the pipe is running at 30/mbits) to buy 200 gigs of harddrive space so they can store all that shit.

Come on. REALISM? Bullshit.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[greenrd]

What do you think these "remote backup services" will be using to store your data on? RAM?

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

As such ISP's will have time to upgrade the backbones to Internet II when it is needed.

Internet2 is not an upgrade to the standard internet. It's an exclusive internet for certain universities and research institutions.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[mollymoo]

Huge SCSI RAID arrays with monstrous caches.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[jhagler]

Most Slashdot readers aren't :)

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[a_nonamiss]

They [Qwest] had more fiber capacity crossing the country than all the other major U.S. providers put together.

Not sure where you got your info, but MCI (Worldcom) is by far the largest holder of backbone bandwidth in the US. Back when I worked there, they had as much bandwidth as the next 20 compeditors combined (including Qwest.) It all came from the old UUNET backbone, which Worldcom purchased in the late '90's. Granted, with their spectacular implosion, (which I am proud to say I avoided by 3 months) I'm sure they have sold some of that bandwidth off, but they had a lot to sell off. That's the primary reason they are still in business today. They had a TON of assets.

Not one to talk without some measure of exidence, you can click here to see an interactive map of all commercial backbones. This is the all public data, but it hasn't been updated in a while. Nonetheless, I have friends that still work at MCI, and they haven't sold off that much bandwidth. They prefer to lease it to customers. Much more profitable.

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that what Windows.NET and Office.NET are all about? Copying the whole Oracle centralized computing idea (ergo the 1970 computing model)?

All I know is I sure as hell won't support the idea that if I launch the windows calculator that I will instantly get charged $0.001 per second I use it! That will really suck!

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[joabj]

The industry estimates that I've seen say only about 2 to 4 percent of the long haul fiber already in the ground is being used now--so its 96 percent dark fiber out there now--and that doesn't factor all the recent jumps in multiplexing technology that are arriving. So I don't think that will be a problem for awhile....

joab

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[mikehuntstinks]

1. All geeks take money that they're aving to upgrad to fiber and buy 1 WiFi antenna each; network them to each other.

2. ?????????

3. free anonymous high speed internet for all!!!!

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[WhiteWolf666]

I wonder....

Perhaps a Mozilla extension, doing stuff with cache files?

Everyone set a big cache, while your at it?

Hmmm...

Dream on :)

Re:Can the backbones handle it?

[netmask]

Sounds like Sprint's failed 'Ion' program.

Bandwidth / byte charges

[suckfish]

What terms & conditions?

Is this flat rate, or are there extra costs?

Are you allowed to run servers at home?

Re:Bandwidth / byte charges

[Siva]

I would imagine the restrictions would be similar to typical cable and DSL offerings. Otherwise it would start to cut into their higher-priced business offerings. Also, wouldn't allowing everyone to run their own server eventually start to chip away at backbone capacity (which, admittedly, I have little sense of)?

Re:Bandwidth / byte charges

[wpc4]

These would be the same questions I would want to see answered. I have 1.5mb/384kb for $60 a month from speakeasy, but as long as what I do isn't illegal they let me do whatever, including selling my service via wifi to my neighbors.

Re:Bandwidth / byte charges

[the_bahua]

Yeah, I am always skeptical when I see deals like this. On the surface, it looks wonderful, except that I live in SBC territory. What I wonder is what kind of contracts there will be. I wonder if the service will require some kind of privacy outrage. I wonder if the service will have any kind of SLA, considering they seem to be aiming this at business and home office.

I will watch this very closely, as I would love these kind of numbers, but I unfortunately don't think it'll be without more cost than the purported amount.

Re:Bandwidth / byte charges

[SphynxSR]

I agree, will also provide a static address if requested. They didn't offer that here when they first came out with DSL. Also will the provide IPv6 instead of IPv4 upon request.

Re:Bandwidth / byte charges

[pediddle]

The catch is that $35 gets you only 3mbps, not 30. They haven't even announced what the price for 30 will be.

30mbps down....

[redhat421]

....and a whole 128k up!! :)

Re:30mbps down....

[ffejie]

Actually, it's 2 Mbps up for the 15 Mbps and 5 Mbps up for the 30 Mbps. According to this article.

Re:30mbps down....

[Anonymous Coward]

FTTP is supposed to be BPON (G.983). That's 622M down, 155M up. Shared media, 32-way split. Counting ATM and scheduling overhead, 20M down and 4M up is about right.

Re:30mbps down....

[aldoman]

This is actually a really, really good point.

Will Fiber stand the test of time like copper has... copper has been on the go for over 100 years. Copper is now being used over 1000 times it's specification when it was designed (3kHz back then, way over 5MHz for VSDL etc).

To acheive the same result with fiber it would have to run at 622Gbps. Before you laugh, in 100 years we will probably be downloading the latest 'holographic DVD' off suprnova.org which will be 1PB ;).

Re:30mbps down....

[Anonymous Coward]

Fiber has bandwidth in the terahertz. No one currently makes equipment that comes close to using its (currently usable) bandwidth.

BPON isn't even cutting edge for current technology. There's a standard for GPON (1 Gbps ATM based PON), EPON (1 Gbps symmetric) and "fat BPON" (1.2G down, 622M up).

DWDM systems currently deployed can carry 80 10 Gbps channels over a single fiber. Your 622 Gbps system already exists -- though it's a bit expensive for individual residential users!

As with copper, you scrap the old electronics on either end and replace them with newer, faster stuff. I think we've still got room to grow with fiber.

Re:30mbps down....

[ePhil_One]

Will Fiber stand the test of time like copper has... copper has been on the go for over 100 years. Copper is now being used over 1000 times it's specification when it was designed (3kHz back then, way over 5MHz for VSDL etc).

The copper that was laid 100 years ago isn't that cat5e stuff thats supporting 1Gbps today. Copper oxidizes, which makes it prone to cracking, raises it resistance, and other bad stuff. When high frequencies are run accross it, signals tend to "hop", creating interference. The copper infrastructure is a nightmare, poorly labeled, etc. Check out the phone closet in a 30 year old building that has had some good turnover and you'll thank god that isn't your job...

Re:30mbps down....

[ces]

Believe it or not some of the old copper up on the poles is actually in pretty good shape and well exceeds spec.

According to many phone company employees I've talked to a T1 or DSL are much more likely to work properly in an old pre-WWII cable if it is in good shape than in cables put up between the 40's and the 80's.

Premises wiring is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. In most cases you are better off ripping out everything up to the demarc and replacing it with cat5e. Of course let the in-building fiber "age" for 30 years and you will likely have a mess as well.

But the telco controled wiring plant typically is in good shape and well documented no matter how old it is.

Business class...

[NeoSkandranon]

I wonder how badly they'll rape businesses for the same class of service? ( thought triggered by another poster's mention of 210$ for business DSL)

Re:Business class...

[Ath]

They may "rape" one part of their business (i.e. the $210/mo subscriber) but if they get an additional 10 people who were not going to sign up because of the pricing, then they are way ahead. Excess bandwidth generates $0.

Re:Business class...

[NeoSkandranon]

In the same vein, 20 small businesses might opt for DSL instead of FTTP if business class DSL is cheaper; performance notwithstanding they may simply not be able to afford that kind of price gouging.

Re:Business class...

[whittrash]

I am not sure that is true. Anyone who is going to pay $210/month is going to use their bandwidth is going to be a heavy user, probably maxing out a lot of the time and at peak usage times for the telecom. $30 people on the other hand has aunt susie who only downloads movie trailers a couple times a month, maybe buys a few songs from i-tunes. Those are the people you want, the people who have brief but intense need for bandwidth, they are cheap to keep. The bandwidth hogs are the expensive ones.

The 10 people who probably did not sign up in your scenario, at $30 a month would equal $300, the cost to support them may be roughly equal to your single $210 heavy use person because they use very little bandwidth, they don't host web pages, they don't use p2p. In my mind that is an extra $90/month in pure profit. Fiber is potentially a competitive advantage that the phone company can install at any time to get an edge over cable because it can do everything cable does only better.

Re:Business class...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how badly they'll rape businesses for the same class of service? ( thought triggered by another poster's mention of 210$ for business DSL)

Calling $210/mo for business class service "raping the customer" is not insightful.

Business class service usually means no filtering, static IPs, absolutely no restrictions on bandwidth usage or what services you run. In addition, if the line goes down, you go to the head of the queue and you'll get priority service for getting it restored. You'll also be more likely to be treated fairly if questions come up.

In other words, it's money well spent for the level of service that it buys. (I have a 384/384 business class line that I pay around $120/mo for, and it's well worth the cash.)

Re:Business class...

[Ath]

You are not calculating it properly. As I mentioned, excess bandwidth generates zero revenue. A bandwidth "hog" is not necessarily a more expensive customer so long as you have excess bandwidth. It is only in the situation where capacity becomes more limited that there is a calculatable revenue affect.

There is nothing inherently more profitable about a low usage user in a situation where there is excess capacity.

Compare it to how low cost airlines stay profitable. They keep their costs low and make sure they avoid any excess capacity. An empty seat is a revenue loss. Even if they sell it for $20, that's $20 more than they were going to get if the seat was empty. Now, they do have a lot of actuaries who are predicting in advance how many seats they can sell at higher prices versus how many might end up empty. Based on those calculations, they allow themselves to sell some seats early at the lower cost.

Even if a particular customer is not profitable, they are helping reduce the losses which impact on the profitability of your other "high value" customers. In today's world, there are some customers who pay a disproportionate amount of the costs for services. These are the "Aunt Susies" that you mentioned. They are not getting $30/mo of value for their fees, but the high users are getting more than $30/mo of value. It's the average that works out to the profitability for the provider.

Re:Business class...

[whittrash]

You are saying that it is less profitable to sell 10 low bandwidth users a service at $30 than one high bandwidth user at $210, even if the bandwidth usage is the same? That doesn't work by my math. I think you are backwards.

From a business perspective it is better to squeeze a higher overall fee from the same equipment and inf5rastructure. That is why it makes business sense for the phone companies to screw the high bandwidth users over and give low bandwidth users the options of a wide pipe when they need it. The high bandwidth users always have their pipe closer to being maxed out, if you give them a bigger pipe they will use more bandwidth. The low bandwidth user will max out their bandwidth for a much shorter duration (like when they download a movie trailer or i-tunes purchased music). When you add up average bandwidth usage over time, the average low usage consumer doesn't consume nearly as much, maybe a tenth or even less when compared to band width hogs. This way, the company can give out extremely high bandwidth connections for cheap, mostly because the consumer will never fully use it, but the consumer still has the comfort and convenience of a high bandwidth connection.

This doesn't really compare to airline business model, it is more like the insurance business, where most of the time it isn't needed but when it is needed it is needed in a big way. That model depends on it not being used. The more it is utilized, the higher the cost.

Re:Business class...

[Ath]

Uh, no it is not comparable to the insurance business at all because the insurance business has no excess capacity or limits to the service it provides.

Telecoms invest capital on equipment and create a certain amount of service capacity based on that capital investment. They want to generate the most revenue possible based on that limited capacity. If they get one high revenue customer that is profitable, that is not nearly as good as 10 customers who are less profitable on average but generate more total revenue. So long as a customer covers the variable costs associated to serve them (which is only a small portion, I am sure, to handle things like installation and invoicing) then that customer is net positive in your cash flow. You already invested the capital, now you have to recuperate those costs. Even Karl Marx knew that.

You are not including excess capacity in your profit calculation at all. The key point is that excess capacity generates zero revenue, which is the worst possible situation when you have a limited capacity to sell. You are much better off selling all your excess capacity at a loss than to let it sit there and generate no revenue.

Without the loss limiting revenue, your single profitable customer no longer really generates any profit at all. He only limits your losses.

Your statement were true that "the more it is utilized, the higher the cost" is ridiculously false. While there are both fixed costs and variable costs based on delivering the service, the fixed costs are the much bigger piece. The more the telecom utilizes the capacity they created does not mean the higher the cost. The more they generate revenue across that capacity, the more they limit their losses, up until the point that they utilize it enough (and therefore generate revenue) which makes the investment profitable.

Not $35 for 30mbps

[AsnFkr]

quoth the artical:

A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans. ...misleading headlines. *sigh*

Re:Not $35 for 30mbps

[stratjakt]

No misleading headline, no headline anywhere said that they'd give you 30Mbps for 45 bucks. That's just the maximum they could give.

All the same, 50 bucks (unbundled) a month for 15Mbps blows the living HELL out of 80 bucks a month for 3Mbps from comcast. Well, 40 bucks for the 'net, another 40 bucks for about six dozen TV channels I dont watch - since you cant seperate the two.

My hope is this ushers in some REAL competition in the home broadband arena. Right now there really isn't any, DSL maxes out at about 1.5, so to be competitive cable only offers 2 or 3, even though they can easily to upwards of 10Mbps..

Hopefully Verizon brings this service to my town, and Comcast kisses my ass with a bump to 10Mbps max.

Re:Not $35 for 30mbps

[orbital3]

It might not be $35 for 30mbps, but considering the best you can do here in Tampa is $45/month for 3mbit through RoadRunner (and I only get 2.4mbit/384kbit) and Verizon's offering is 1.5m/384k for $35, I'm very much looking forward to a 15m/2m connection for the same price I'm paying for RR now. Here's hoping I actually get it at my house.

Re:Not $35 for 30mbps

[Slowtreme]

Considering I'm paying $79 for 1.5m/384k with Verizon now, A plan they don't even list/support, I'd love to pay $30, $45, or whatever... for this.

Headlines be dammed.

Re:Not $35 for 30mbps

[Slowtreme]

Wait a min! I'm in Tampa and the 1.5m/384k plan cost me 80 bucks a month ontop of my phone bill. But it's a hell of a lot faster then the $45 RR service I got rid of. I'm calling them right now...

Re:Not $35 for 30mbps

[Vaystrem]

I'm Probably not the only Canadian who says WHO CARES? Why you say? Well here in Regina Saskatchewan - a city of only 200,000 people. I have 2 options.

1 - Local Cable Company - 5 mbps down / 1 up 29.95CDN [19.1 USD] a month for first 6 months - and then $45CDN [$35USD] a month after that.

2 - Local Telco - 5 mpgs down / 640 up for $49.95CDN [$38.17] a month.

[Conversions done with yahoo Currency Converter]

What I want to know - is how can such a small market like this one have such unbelievable pricing - when such a large market cannot. A larger surprise? The 15,000 (approx) person city in this province has access to the same deal through the Telco..??

People have responded saying that a smaller city it would be easier to implement the technology necessary to rollout DSL. That's probably true - but the amount of customers and capital available within the United States would make such a rollout very viable within a larger community as well so I don't necessarily buy this argument.

Our Telco is also running TV over DSL, and has been since the middle of last year (as a province wide city rollout) and in testing for employees an d a select few for a few years before that!

The same is for long distance & local service. Here local service is bundled into your monthly connection fee so there is no charge for local calls. As well I've been paying $20.00 CDN [$15.28 USD] for unlimited long distance evenings 6pm-8am & weekends nationwide for the last 6 years or so? Why are these plans only now emerging in the United States?

This is very interesting to me, because Canada is a larger country than the United States, with the population of California (a bit less actually) so the rules of the market, and the actual capital that is available within Canada for such initiatives is much smaller than that available to the United States. And yet for long distance, what I deem an essential service we pay and have paid significantly less for years, and for Internet (which is increasingly becoming essential) the same thing has occured.

I guess it all amounts to the American market getting screwed, which is a sad thing because if there were a significantly larger amount of US broadband users, I suspect that broadband content would ramp up to a much higher / faster degree than it is currently.

Just some thoughts.

Humbug

[Jahf]

I can't get *DSL capabilities from Qwest or Cable modems where I live ... and Verizon isn't anywhere near my area ... I would guess that for most people FTTP is WAY far out in the future, if it happens at all.

I'd definitely pay for it ... hell I'd double that ... but I don't presume to see it.

Re:Humbug

[vxvxvxvx]

I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah, they'll likely roll it out initially in 2 cities that noone has ever heard of, but by 2037 they'll be rolling it out in your neighborhood.

Re:Humbug

[Jahf]

Just in time for my retirement party ... yippee!

Re:Humbug

[Paco Bedejo]

It is currently a 10 year plan to hit all major centers. If you live in the middle of Bum-!@#$ Egypt, don't expect to be ordering this service for another 20 years. I'm one of the drafters for this project, let me just say that there's a !@#$load of fiber optic cables & related hardware to be buried & terminated before this hits even just the towns with 200,000 people or more. But, I can assure you that this will happen eventually. We've even been drafting placement & service of fiber down dirt roads, thru Mobile Home Parks, & large commercial & industrial areas. This will happen...but it's gonna take a long time. Rumors say that we have $40,000,000,000 devoted to this project over the next 20 years. There are no other companies that can give you even 1/2 of the hope for true Broadband than Verizon does. The Fiber itself is capable of 6gbps (yes, giga) transfer speed. Yet, we all know that the related hardware, both on the user & provider ends, will not be capable of this speed for many many years, without extremely high prices. What this project is about, is not getting you good service tomorrow, but giving great service over the next several decades. It's a long term plan, & I would suggest that you ignore the price issues at the moment.

"FTT"P sounds like...

[JessLeah]

...the bastard child of FTP and HTTP.

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[ScytheBlade1]

No, it really really does. I swear, I can't count the times I read that as "HTTP" giving me 30mbps.

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[Anonymous Coward]

It has it's father's eyes.

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[red_dragon]

Really, now? For a while there I thought that Bill The Cat had a hand in it.

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[orangepeel]

I was just relieved that it didn't turn out to mean "F-ing Twisted Transfer Protocol".

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[ezzewezza]

those aren't eyes, those are tees.

Re:"FTT"P sounds like...

[djdavetrouble]

Good time to get this out of my system.
As a guy that grew up in california (bay area) and graduated high school in 1987, I always thought FTP was hilarious, since to me FTP was Fuck the Police by NWA. Lends a nice double entendre to ftp sitez.

Monthly Bandwidth Limit

[umrgregg]

Does Verizon throttle your connection if you use a certain ammount of bandwidth a month? I ask because I can see subscribers hitting any limits fairly quickly with 15Mbit/s. pr0n servers beware.

Re:Monthly Bandwidth Limit

[maskedbishounen]

I have Speakeasy's OSDN Plan. 6Mb down. I always get a kick out of it, as they offer usenet service along with it. A gig per e-mail account unless you upgrade with some rip-off prices. :) Luckily, they throw around eight mailboxes, but it's still a hassle to switch over every few minutes for batch leechings.

Re:Monthly Bandwidth Limit

[Halthar]

Like the other responder to your post I also now have a 6Mbps/768Kbps account with Speakeasy, but prior to that I had a 768Kbps/128Kbps line from Verizon. If you have the option of Speakeasy, I can't possibly recommend better. Their service is really top notch, and the 6Mbps downstream is wonderful.

I may get shot for it and then be forced to turn in my Slashdot ID, but while I was using Verizon's service I actually liked it. It wasn't terribly fast, but had great uptime in my experience(I had 3 outages over the course of 3 years each of which was roughly 10-15 minutes of downtime).

With Verizon I regularly downloaded 30-50 Gig a month and never ran into any throttling for downloads or uploads(I watch a ton of FanSubbed Anime as well as telecommute). So, while I admittedly can't comment on this new service, I can say that at least in my experience there is no throttling, and I admittedly consumed quite a bit of bandwidth. This may however be specific to the Washington DC area and the nagging/throttling may happen in other areas.

Re:Monthly Bandwidth Limit

[drinkypoo]

30-50GB a month is fiddlesticks. I downloaded 120GB in a month once, which by no means is the most anyone has ever pulled off a cable modem, and I got a nice abuse letter from comcast. Turns out they want you using less than 90GB of downstream transfer per month.

Re:Monthly Bandwidth Limit

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Verizon throttle your connection if you use a certain ammount of bandwidth a month? I ask because I can see subscribers hitting any limits fairly quickly with 15Mbit/s. pr0n servers beware.

For consumer-class service? Yeah, they probably do...

Some of us are smart and pony up for business-class DSL. I pull down pretty much 100-110GB per month, non-stop, 12 months a year, and have never gotten so much as a single post-card.

(Course, I pay for the privilege... about 3x the going rate.)

A note to everyone:

[l33t-gu3lph1t3]

This FTTP setup sounds great - but realise they're talking about fiber to the *HOME*. You want business usage? Static IP? Be prepared to pay out the @$$ for it just like with any other business ISP.

Re:A note to everyone:

[Anonymous Coward]

For that matter, AT&T is referring to this as FTTH.

Re:A note to everyone:

[rritterson]

Not if they do co-hosting like they do with DSL.

I have 3000/512 service through an SBC leased line, and I get it at the same price as SBC-yahoo users, but I get 4 static IPs and excellent customer service. (They've called me thrice- once to insure I had thing setup okay, and twice to make sure a problem was fixed to my satisfaction)

I can thing of 3 other ISPs available to me who have the same qualities.

Re:A note to everyone:

[silentbozo]

Assuming that the user isn't saddled with some crappy PPPOE connection that automatically cuts out after a few hours, some bright soul with a backbone presence could sell a SSH tunneling service and a box, to turn your high-bandwith, but feature-poor consumer connection, into a business-class connection.

Here's what I mean: you set up a VPN over SSH, which redirects a select group of ports associated with a static but virtual IP on the provider's box, which sits on the backbone somewhere. This effectively gives you a high bandwidth static IP (at the cost of latency, and a potential bottleneck at the provider's box). As far as your consumer provider knows, you're running a VPN connection. As far as your clients know, you're running a static IP, server, etc.

Of course, this assumes that your consumer provider will let you run a VPN connection, even over SSH, AND it assumes that the static IP provider has mucho bandwidth to handle the traffic coming from you, and then the traffic to the rest of the internet.

Re:A note to everyone:

[LordMyren]

i fail to imagine the advantage over colocated servers.

basically you have twice the potential failure points (and everything in between), you have to pay for twice as much bandwidth at your colocation point (since it passes all data through to you & vice-verse), and you need some beasty encryption to VPN all that high bandwidth madness.

what about having your root domain co-located, and rapidly update that to match your current dynamic? a lesser ipv6. i suppose dns caching would fux0r things up.

Re:A note to everyone:

[UID1000000]

That's a good point. Also what about the fees of setting up the cable? Last time I bought micron cables I found that they're seriously expensive, even in the 50 foot variety.

What kind of cable would they use? Micron or something else? Don't even say Cat5e or I'll have to smack you.

Re:A note to everyone:

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. We replaced 4 T1 lines with 35 mbit fiber connection with the option to turn it up to 155 in a heartbeat. We pay a whopping $1100 a month more. This brought us up to a enterprise service level contract with AT&T and have proceeded to upgrade 2 other office locations for dirt cheap.

The downside is we had to put a mux in each building which is the size of a full server rack. Still, $6k a month for a fiber connection is dirt cheap, not to mention we have a backup T1 as a dark line as well that cuts over in a 3 ping heartbeat.

going to smoke cable

[havaloc]

Let's face it, cable companies can offer one thing that the phone companies can't, and that's television. If this FTTP thing works out, things are going to be great. More choices is always a good thing. If they build their own fiber, they won't have to share, which I think is one of the things that are holding things back. I realize that regulation got us into this mess, but it's time that the phone companies grow up and do something about it, instead of whining about it.

Re:going to smoke cable

[falcon5768]

based on the article text... no its not. Make cable cheaper... yes, but they are pretty much running at the same speeds likewise its much chearper for me to pay 30 bucks a month for cable, than buy two aditional services just to get a 5 dollar price reducation to 35, and i dont use long distance.....

Re:going to smoke cable

[kent_eh]

Let's face it, cable companies can offer one thing that the phone companies can't, and that's television.

Really? I think my local telephone company would want to argue that point.

Re:going to smoke cable

[Phalse Impressions]

Actually I found an article recently for Bell Canada that actually allows for TV over the phone lines. I can't find the article right now but here is the jist of it:

If you are in a condo that is equipped with VDSL you just need what amounts to a cable box on your desk and not only do you get TV services equal to their ExpressVu services but you also get ADSL service as well, 4mbps down 800k up. Unalike cable though all the stations are digital instead of everything above channel 72 or what ever.

I don't know how things are going on the US side of the border but up here the next year looks like it will be interesting. Cable taking phone business and phone business taking cable.

Re:going to smoke cable

[whittrash]

If phone companies bring in fiber, they will be able to offer TV as well. They will have the bandwidth to do it, right now they don't.

Re:going to smoke cable

[Fjandr]

Why innovate when you can get Congress or a regulartory agency to lay the hammer down on competitors? I see major lawsuits in the future to try and gain access to these networks, and in the current national socialist environment in the US, it is more than likely the path that will be taken.

However, I still hold out hope that those with integrity will win out. It just doesn't normally happen than way. The road to Hell is always the easiest, unfortunately.

Re:going to smoke cable

[Anonymous Coward]

1550 nM WDM technology allows for a separate lambda on the fiber, just to deliver television to your house.

Expect something similar to but different from cable television. There's no economy in being another me-too video service provider.

Re:going to smoke cable

[n8_f]

Are you astroturfing for Verizon? I love this:
More choices is[sic] always a good thing.
and then:
If they build their own fiber, they won't have to share, which is one of the things holding things back.
But if they had to share, there would be more choices. The problem is, they don't want more choices. They are being forced by convergence and aggressive cable operators to turn their monopoly into a duopoly, but the less competitors, the better for them.

I realize that regulation got us into this mess
No, regulation did not get us into this mess. Monopolies did. Regulation is one of the ways to deal with monopolies. Another is to introduce competition (not really possible in this case). A third, and probably the only solution in the long run, is end-user ownership.

[B]ut it's time that the phone companies grow up and do something about it, instead of whining.
Why? Whining seems to be working. From the article:

The Federal Communications Commission plans to allow the Bells to invest in fiber without requiring them to share their infrastructure with third parties, as is the case with copper wire networks. For many years, the Bells have protested that the line-sharing rules on copper wire networks are unfair, because cable companies are not required to share their lines.

They just got their monopoly on services back.

Re:going to smoke cable

[Anonymous Coward]

A french provider Free offers phone + TV (50 channels and counting) + 4Mbps/512kbps DSL for 30 euros ($35) a month... With no restriction whatsoever on the use of the DSL connection.
And national phone communications are free.

There has been quite a violent battle between the ISPs here, and we now have very good offers. And very good prices.

How much for a static IP?

[sonofagunn]

As a Tampa-area resident I am stoked. I just hope they can offer static IPs for a price competitive with RoadRunner's cable-modem static IP ($60).

Re:How much for a static IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out RapidSys, they are fantastic providers of internet services in the bay area.

Re:How much for a static IP?

[B.Hoover]

I use Roadrunner for Business with static IP and it's $90 bucks here in Orlando...

Re:How much for a static IP?

[PerpetualMonkey]

I'm a Tampa area resident, and hope this comes soon, but really, why do you need a static? its cheaper to use a dynmaic DNS service, like this one: http://dns2go.deerfield.com/Dynamic_DNS/

Re:How much for a static IP?

[twistedcubic]

Who wants to bother having to update their DNS records every other day? Also, you don't have to listen to people whining about the "problems" running "servers".

Re:How much for a static IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're getting cornholed at that price.

Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anomalous Canard]

First, I don't like this bundling of services. I want lockin in one area to constrain my choice.

Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.

Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly. They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.

So, while FTTH is an excellent idea, bundling it with a lot of services I don;t need isn't.

We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire. The regulated monopoly *must not* be allowed to compete in ancillary services.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Mistah Blue]

My personal opinion is that deregulating any sort of utility is bad. This includes the breakup of AT&T, electric deregulation, airline deregulation, etc. All of these companies price to the point where they are eating their young, so to speak. Are we really any better off? And before you go ranting about airline deregulation, my point of view is the weekly business traveler. I don't care about discount rates (although my company does to an extent) because all of my travel is to customer premises where I have to be there at a specific time (so I normally book full fare). I would rather have airelines that are financially healthy, and not cutting service to the bone.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[athakur999]

I have Verizon DSL in Dallas, and I have no such restriction on outgoing SMTP, so that seems to be a regional thing. I also use DHCP instead of PPPoE.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Moofie]

So as long as your needs are being met, the rest of us can go fuck off?

I would rather have airlines that have to compete in a marketplace, evolving their business models to the most efficient ones possible. That's what a free market is for.

Airlines aren't de-regulated. You're not allowed to fly from Love Field on Southwest to a state not contiguous with Texas, because of a thirty year old law against healthy airline competition.

I say if American Airlines is in such bad financial straits, let Southwest take them over and run them profitably.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[mattkime]

I'm in verizon country and I have MCI for local phone service instead. I also have DSL through MCI. Both have been excellent despite Verizon being responsible for the line.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[renehollan]

Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.

This is misleading. I have Verizon service (POTS and DSL) in Monroe, WA, and they don't touch my traffic and don't give a fig about what servers I run.

See I have DSL service from Verizon, but they are not my ISP, so I don't have to put up with assanine ToS. I get my internet connectivity from blarg.net. Verizon just provides the backhaul from the DSLAM to Blarg! And, to their credit, Blarg! doesn't use MTU-mangling PPPoE. Just one long virtual circuit private "electonic highway" onramp for me (well, a dedicated lane on that onramp, if you really want to push the analogy -- work with me here :-)). My "always on" connection is very much always on.

Verizon sucks rotten eggs, as far as serivce is concerned (took 'em forever to acknowledge that, yes, I had an international long distance plan, and no, my calls to Canuckistan were not to be billed at $0.75/minute), but I'm stuck with them as a telco. So, I subscribe to what little I can. In this case, that means just the data pipe from me to my ISP.

There is a bit of a downside, of course, and that is price. But, it is not unreasonable: instead of some $30 a month for neutered dynamic IP access, I pay them closer to $40 a month just for the pipe and another $35 a month or so to Blarg!. Static IP? No problem (well, it costs a bit extra, included in the above price). NATed hosts? No problem. Inbound SMTP? No problem (but don't relay please: the IP address is ours and we like to keep a clean anti-SPAM reputation). Inbound telnet? Hey, it's your security, do what you want. Sure. Inbound HTTP? It's your box you're Slashdotting, not ours.

Now, of course, there are a few things I shouldn't do that'd hurt Blarg!, like run a busy site at the end of a DSL link, but those kinds of things would be bad to me too. Still, no one is going to cut me off for opening up port 80 for a day or two of private testing.

So, yeah, sure, sell me a fatter cheaper pipe Verizon. If all you can do with a modest degree of competence is sell pipes, do that.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.

I work for Verizon. That isn't true. (By "that," I mean the first part. The second part is true.)

Verizon is evil, though.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're happy to pay twice as much for the basic service that you should have gotten in the first place? Good for you.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[kelnos]

Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly. They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.

i don't have a beef with their legal challenge. they were basically required to share their infrastructure with their competitors at less than cost. yeah, sure, i want to go and plunk down billions of dollars to string up and bury cable, and then pay to maintain it while someone else profits off of it, all while getting paid a pittance in compensation. i think not.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Erwos]

Interesting you should mention this.

I have a friend who's a manager at Verizon. He mentioned that Verizon has to treat their competitors better than their customers because of regulation :).

That's why you can order DSL with Covad, and they'll be totally on the ball getting it hooked up, and Verizon would just twiddle its thumbs in the same situation.

-Erwos

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[emil_nikolov]

SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.

I'm in greater Philadelphia area and this is my third location using Verizon Home DSL and they don't filter anything. I'm using 4 different STMP servers - work, school, wife's school + old free service. They do however sell the email addresses cause I have never used it and it get tons of spam . I check it like once every couple of months when I log online to view my bill but still the amount of spam is way too much.

I reply cause I don't have any mod points to mod up the other replies.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[renehollan]

So you're happy to pay twice as much for the basic service that you should have gotten in the first place?

It's questionable whether a free market could provide this level of service (essentially unmettered 1.5Mx384k DSL with a single static IP) for less. That I can get a degraded level of service for less isn't the question: I can -- I just don't want it.

Just about all non-Verizon ISPs charge around the $30 a month rate over and above the line charge for a static IP. Of course, if you go with the resold Verizon dynamic IP package, the whole thing can be bundled for around $25 or so. Verizon charges around $100 a month for it's "business class" service with a static IP and, interestingly, won't sell it to residential addresses (this is poor-man's biz. DSL, BTW, without any QoS or uptime guarantees). At leazst

Verizon competes with Comcast in the "crippled broadband" arena, so their crippled service pricing is somewhat capped by that limited competition. More exotic alternatives like satellite, and fixed wireless, are more expensive than $25 a month and generally require greater capital outlay. So, it stands to reason that $25 a month is a reasonable "rock bottom" estimate for the price of crippled service to be sold at a profit.

Against that, paying double for decent, uncapped, unfiltered service, with a static IP address is not unreasonable.

Would I like to pay less? Of course. Do I think I'm being gouged? No.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[MrZeebo]

Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.

I have Verizon DSL. This is not true (at least where I am). None of my SMTP traffic goes through Verizon's servers, and all of my mail gets through.

Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly.

They are indeed a local phone monopoly, but have you followed local phone news lately? That market is tanking, and quickly. If you don't give any additional business to local phone companies and they must survive only on local phone service, they'll probably go out of business, or you'll have to pay exhorbitant fees to local calls. I don't know of any local phone company that doesn't offer at least some other services to offset the shrinking local phone market.

They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.

Challenged the law, yes, but not to get rid of it. They just don't want to be forced to sell their lines wholesale for less than it costs to maintain them. I personally think that's reasonable. Whether you do or not, that is what they are challenging, not the fact that they have to sell to their competitors in general.

We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire. The regulated monopoly *must not* be allowed to compete in ancillary services.

Actually not a bad idea. But then you have to decide on a means of transmissions. So what will it be -- DSL (copper), cable, or fiber? Who's to decide?

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[petabyte]

Umm, maybe thats how it is there but here on Verizon I'm quite capable of sending out on my local mailserver. I've stopped doing that though due to RBLs. I send email out with the return address of my domain and this works fine if you enable smtp authentication and can put in the verizon password.

YMMV.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Verizon and use PPPoE (in Philadelphia) and I do not have a restriction on outgoing SMTP either. I use my company's SMTP server.

I remember having a earthlink dialup account years ago that had smtp blocked (other than their server). Maybe its earthlink you're thinking of?

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Jodka]

"We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire."

Q: What is the only remaining stone-age backwards-ass conduit used for broadband delivery?
A: Twisted pair.

Q: Where is the only place you find twisted pair used for broadband?
A: The last mile of domestic broadband provided by telecoms.

Q: What is the only broadband conduit controlled by regulated monopolies?
A: The last mile of domestic broadband provided by telecoms.

The ENTIRE COUNTRY is wired for broadband except for the last mile to homes. The last mile is the ONLY government regulated monopoly. The REASON that that we are stuck with this crappy copper twisted pair telecom service to our doors is BECAUSE it has been provided by regulated monopolies.

After several decades of government regulated monopolies, suddenly the courts introduce competition for the last mile of service by establishing private property rights to the last mile. Now, for the first time, companies which invest in building the last mile have exclusive control over their own network. Now they can recoup investments in the network infrastructre by selling selling service to customers, instead of being being undercut by competitores selling service over that same network. And what happens as a result? Companies roll out fiber. Cheap fiber. Fiber cheaper than DSL. Fiber with thousands of times the bandwith. You think this is just, what? coincidence?

Face the facts. Socialism does not work. You socialists had your chance for decades and you screwed it up. The continued existence of twisted pair on the last mile is a textbook example of socialism not working. It is our turn now. Property rights, rule of law, and competition have arrived on the scene; The free market has is here, say hello to ever cheaper fiber to the doorstep.

You liberals, with your government regulation and monopolies. Cry all you like about free markets. I revel in your ideological dispair! Ah... that delightful schadenfreude, as an unregulated capitalist upgrades my POTS line to $35.00/ month fiber while you writhe in political frustration.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[DaveJay]

FYI: I have DSL extreme. I have a 6000/1500 DSL connection with three static IPs, a similar attitude to Blarg! regarding services and servers, and a proven track record at protecting my interests against spammers and extortionists.

And I pay $60 a month. Monthly. And it's a rock-stable connection, and their customer service is excellent.

But yeah, the DSL line itself is from SBC, and if they were my ISP, it would be awful. :)

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[dosius]

Hm, I use the Verizon SMTP server with my dosius.com e-mail addresses...

Moll.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anomalous Canard]

What a load of bullshit. In my neigherborhood, it isn't the last mile which is copper. If that were the case, I could have gotten DSL from a Verizon competitor. There *is* no copper from the CO to my house. Everything is fiber except for the last 50 feet from the pole. Don't give me this "last mile" bullshit.

Verizon is rolling out fiber to the home because its *cheaper for them* THere's no huge investment in infrastructure. They already have people who splice fiber. They have all the tools. It must be easier for them to get rid of the noisy copper on the last 50 feet and stop training people how to maintain that crap.

SO, I don't get the benefit of a competitive market for local phose service, instead I get to pay more to Verizon for a service which in the end costs them a lot less in service.

Your free market blinders are keeping you from seeing how things really are.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Monopoly?

Dude, get a cell phone.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not a monopoly if you have the choice between DSL and Cable Modem...

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[mattkime]

Strangely, that matches my experience trying to order DSL from Verizon. Then again, most people's experiences ordering DSL from a 3rd party is quite the opposite.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Mistah Blue]

Don't take this personal, but yeah, if my needs are being met by the airlines you can bugger off. I'm tired of amateur travelers increasing queue lengths getting through security. But what torques me off more than amateurs, is TSA. They know travel is picking up, but they aren't doing anything about it. They still insist on window dressing, feel good security. How does taking my shoes off increase security??? Those long queues getting through security are a bigger security problem IMO, if you catch my drift.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[n8_f]

So, yeah, sure, sell me a fatter cheaper pipe Verizon. If all you can do with a modest degree of competence is sell pipes, do that.

Well, that's the problem, isn't it? Read the article:

The Federal Communications Commission plans to allow the Bells to invest in fiber without requiring them to share their infrastructure with third parties, as is the case with copper wire networks. For many years, the Bells have protested that the line-sharing rules on copper wire networks are unfair, because cable companies are not required to share their lines.

Verizon hates Blarg, et al, and now they don't have to deal with them. DSL is dead, has been dead for years, and fiber is the future. Verizon has known this, but they waited until they could get this out of the FCC before putting any money into it. Welcome to the future!

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that electric deregulation probably had a lot to do with California's rolling blackouts and the giant blackout last year, but the only thing bad thing about AT&T's breakup is that operators are no longer useful.

As a matter of fact, modems weren't even allowed by AT&T because you could only plug in equipment that you rented from them (that's why acoustic couplers were invented). I remember having to pay for each extension, and you had to be pretty rich to get an additional phone line. Lord only knows if we would have fax machines or cordless phones by now. But the most important thing is that it used to cost an arm and a leg to call long-distance, such that it was a big deal ("Shhh...Aunt Martha's on the phone long-distance!"). Now I can call any state I want for any length of time, whenever I want, and my phone bill is always $50. See http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/images/sb_rates_ 4.gif for Florida's peak LD rates 6 months before the breakup. Breaking up AT&T was the best thing that has happened to telecom in the US since the transistor was invented.

As for airlines, I would probably only be able to fly for business purposes if it was never deregulated. Considering how rarely I do that, I don't mind deregulation. While I hate the crowding and crappy service, there are probably many routes that wouldn't even be available because they wouldn't be viable without all the tourists riding cheap.

aQazaQa

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Rich0]

Ever hear of the "jet-set"? Those were the elite who could afford airline tickets back in the ages of which you are nostalgic.

Trust me, most of us occassional bussiness travelers wouldn't travel at all if tickets were still that expensive.

On the other hand, something does have to give as far as overcongestion goes. Either we need more airports, or limits on the number of flights that one is allowed to handle. Sure, that would raise ticket prices, but then you could fly out of O'Hare and have a 50% chance of an on-time departure...

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[renehollan]

Verizon hates Blarg, et al.

I gave Verizon every chance to sell me the service I wanted: 1.5Mx384k, one static IP address, no unreasonable monthly caps (yeah, so I downloaded Fedora Core 2 sources and binaries, so?), and the freedom to open any port I like that requires authentication (SSH, IMAP-SSL), and commonly used ports (like SMTP) to anyone. I'm willing to accept reasonable restrictions on the ports providing anonymous access -- i.e. "thou shalt not relay email!". So, Verizon, sell me.

Well, first they said that a static IP was only available for "business" service. O.K., how much? Well, it was about $10 a month more than I really wanted to spend ($90 as opposed to $80), but I could squeeze somewhere else - $10 is worth the hassle to not deal with separate DSL and ISP providers. You'd think it would be a slam dunk sale for their 'droid, right? Wrong. They won't sell "business DSL" (and this doesn't even include QoS commitments) to residential addresses. I tried. Fuck you, Verizon. Hello, Blarg!

The fact that people like me are willing to pay double for marginally upgraded services should send a message to telcos like Verizon. If they could provide the service I want at a price I'm willing to pay, I'd buy it from them. Still, they have no right to complain: I'm still paying them more for the pipe than I would for the pipe and service from them (albeit, somewhat crippled service).

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[Mistah Blue]

I understand. However, I belong to that class of traveler known as the Road Warrior. It doesn't matter what the ticket costs when I have to be onsite at a customer at 9am tomorrow. In fact, I normally book full fare. It allows me the flexibility I need (such as when I got extended onsite last week) to make changes. I'm in the minority that keeps the airlines afloat. I wish they would remember that and cater to me more. It sounds selfish, but I don't really care. If you travel weekly you'll understand where I'm coming from. If not, you won't understand and that's OK too.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[n8_f]

Tell me about it. I work for a small ISP that does DSL, etc. It is tough. There is no way we can match Verizon's prices. It isn't because we have higher overhead, it is because they rent us the lines. There is no way they will let us be price competitive. Which doesn't matter for people like you or me, but most of the public doesn't know what they are missing. Still, after dealing with Verizon, a lot of people are happy to switch to us and we have never lost a customer to Verizon (that I'm aware of).

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[renehollan]

Ah yes, grasshopper: It is difficult to sell water when it rains. This is why one does not provide "online" access -- one provides "Internet" access.

You may get far less customers, but you probably get far more knowledgable ones. I wonder how your support costs compare to a telco that caters to the sheeple that flock over to "that thar internat thingy". Covet not the attention of morons for, while many in number and flush with coin, they will vex thine support staff.

Where the smaller ISP can shine is in providing superior and distinct services. For example, I sink my own email -- it's the primary reason I have a static IP address. Still, I like to have a backup MX somewhere that can cache mail when my inbound server is down for maintenance. Right now, the comnpany hosting my website provides this, but remote access is via POP. I fetchmail from them and let my local sendmail sort things out. IMAP-SSL would be better, but they don't provide it. Still, if you're at the end of a fixed DSL link and my traffic routes through your and the telco's switches, I could tolerate plain-text authentication to your servers. Remember when plain text PPP authentication over dial up was just fine? Same principle.

So, sell me backup MX services, DNS for my domain, maybe a caching NNTP service, and while you're at it, NTP would be real great. Heck, throw it all together and sell me a real "domain" package deal without raking me over the coals: despite having a personal "family" domain, I don't run a biz, don't have large amounts of outbound traffic, and don't need a domain cert for commerce. I don't want to pay per-email address: just cap my aggregate inbound (backup MX) mail spool. Oh, hey, sell me a local VoIP PSTN "hop on" number, and partner with one of the bigger VoIP carriers, reselling their service. Retail some SIP hardware, like APs, SIP phones, etc.

I think there's lots of services a smaller ISP can offer to make themselves attractive to a larger audience that do not involve large amounts of outbound traffic.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[fltsimbuff]

"Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address."

Not true. VOL Does filter so you cannot use other SMTP servers in some places, but You CAN use non VOL addresses with their servers. You only have to make sure you are authenticating with it.

Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil

[HuguesT]

I thought that DHCP was an IP number allocation protocol and PPPoE a transport protocol. How can you use one instead of the other?

sounds good...

[aberant]

Having done tech support for ADSL i'm always hesitant about phone companies offering new technology. I wonder how long after someone gets it, that they realize all the hidden fees and other random charges making it much more then advertised. But then again, with all that dark fiber lying around allready, who knows? I'll still prolly sign up for it if i can to avoid that silly upstream cap on cable modems.. 8)

they could add p2p...

[jpellino]

so you could use p2p with ftp and http and call it "pffft"!

30mbps?

[Anonymous Coward]

the minimum uplink would have to be at LEAST 2 megabits for it to be usable. this is the dead of T-1.

Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[haplo21112]

Why is it that Cable and Telcos always luanch these things in the middle of No place...

Wouldn't make more sense to launch it in MA where nearly the entire Easteren half of the state is sreaming for this kind of thing... or in the Valley In CA...

Tech savay places that could really take advanage of things like this...

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Why is it that Cable and Telcos always luanch these things in the middle of No place...

When the inevitable FUBARs happen, there are less pissed off people and less stuff to fix. Then when they've worked out the deployment bugs, they can try a larger market.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[kniemczak]

Or even Houston...not that I have any personal interest for it to be there

*cough*

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't call 32,000 people "middle of No place".

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Ohm2k]

That's exactly why you do it in noplace. Slow, controled rollout w/o tons of people beating down your door looking for install. The slower rollout also gives you the chance to work out any kinks in the process of order taking, install, provisioning, hardware alocation, Ect.

While I enjoy being first with these type things, going 2nd has it's advantages.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Sjobeck]

intelligent people "roll out" a service, versu scarpet bombing the largest and most important cities with their mistakes.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Kentamanos]

Just FYI, Keller is not in the middle of nowhere. It's a pretty nice suburb in the D/FW (Dallas/Fort Worth) metroplex. Based upon the average income of the area, I'd say it's a pretty good idea to try it there.

There's a lot of tech types who live out there (who work in Dallas, etc.), so they probably figured that makes it a nice place to start as well due to demand.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[dragmorp]

Noplace?

Tampa bay has very high population density (Pinellas county being one of the most densly populated areas in the country). A small geographic rollout will be able to service a very large population of people.

I am sure that Tampa has lower regulatory overhead than other large population centers like New York, etc.

We were one of the first areas to get cable modems as well (Road runner) for this reason.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[ffejie]

Verizon had to roll this out in "nowhere" Keller TX because of regulation laws. They wanted their first roll out to be out of their landline footprint so they wouldn't get tangled up with the FCC too much. However, Hopkinton MA (eastern MA - home of EMC) is one of the top 10 towns on the list (also, in VZ Footprint), and so is most of So Cal. Expect it in the 150 biggest markets in 8~12 months, or so says the buzz.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Anonymous Coward]

Keller is problably where the lower level managers and worker bees live and South Lake is where the Lower Executives live for Verizon. Keller is a good choice if I got the demographics right.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Mournblade]

Where did you find the list of towns? I looked at all the reports and did a google search and couldn't come up with one.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Gogo Dodo]

Read the Verizon release here.

I'll quote the part you're interested in:

• In California, Verizon plans to pass about 100,000 homes and businesses with FTTP technology in the Huntington Beach area and in other parts of Southern California.
• In Florida, Verizon plans to pass about 100,000 homes and businesses with FTTP technology in the Tampa area and parts of Hillsborough County.
• In Texas, Verizon plans to pass 100,000 homes in part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, including Keller, which was announced by the company in May.

Verizon intends to pass 1 million homes and businesses in parts of nine states with fiber by the end of the year.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[ffejie]

I can't reveal that information (seriously).

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Mournblade]

Thanks, but the comment I was replying to specifically mentioned "top 10 towns", one of which was in Mass. The press release didn't mention 10 towns, nor did it mention Massachussetts.

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[Mournblade]

Can you at least say if Arlington, VA is on the list?

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[JT Snortbuckle JrIII]

No, no, no - come to Alexandria, VA first. I *need* this! :)

Re:Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first?

[haplo21112]

Thats small potatoes compares to some "small" towns in New England...Your still a small town around here in some places with a population for 60,000.

What about Upload speed? Static IP?

[jonasmit]

With fiber will there still be a lower Upstream speed like Cable/DSL? (And why is that exactly)

Quantum Leap?

[manganese4]

-- Begin Self-important rant -- Ahh yes another imporper use of the term quantum leap. When will people learn that the term has nothing to do with a large change and that it simply refers to a change in states whose values are essentially predetermined, in many respects similar to multiples of 300 in the old baud rates for modems. When you purchaes that lightning fast 2400 baud modem you were making a quantum leap from that clunky 300 baud modem because the speeds had been predetermined for you.

All Verison is doing is creating a whole new system and there is no real dependence of the news speeds on the old, thus no quantum leap -- End Self important rant

Re:Quantum Leap?

[Anonymous Coward]

I always took the phrase "quantum leap" to mean something like an electron tunneling through a barrier, which is common at the level of quantum physics but extremely unlikely in the macro world that we see.

Thus, a quantum leap is not a leap of infinitesimally small proportions, but a leap through a previously unpenetrable barrier.

Re:Quantum Leap?

[Eric Smith]

When you purchaes that lightning fast 2400 baud modem you were making a quantum leap from that clunky 300 baud modem because the speeds had been predetermined for you.

A switch from 300 bps to 2400 bps dialup modems does not qualify as a quantum leap, because the 300 bps was not an inherently fixed rate. The "300 baud" modems did not actually constrain the bit rate arbitrarily. They used Bell 103 FSK modulation, most commonly at rates of 110 and 300 baud, and less commonly at 134.5 and 450 baud. The modulator didn't care what the bit rate was, but if you raised it too high the demodulator wouldn't work. If you wanted to use the modem at 271.828 bps, it would work fine as long as the other end also wanted that bit rate.

Bell 202 FSK modulation did the same thing, typically at 1200 bps (half-duplex).

On the other hand, the 1200 bps full duplex modems (Bell 212, V.22) used synchronous PSK modulation, so they truly did have discrete bit rates. Technically they are 600 baud modems, with two bits per symbol.

A 2400 bps dialup modem (V.22bis modulation) is also only 600 baud, using QAM modulation with four bits per symbol (16 constellation points).

So a switch from a Bell 212 1200 bps modem to a V.22bis 2400 bps modem would meet your definition of a quantum leap.

Most higher-speed dialup modems other than "56K" also use QAM modulation, with a higher baud rate and more bits per symbol.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

So now you get modded up for not only copying the article off of a news site and violating copywrites, not only doing so when the site isn't even slashdotted, but doing all of this while logged in so you can karma whore?

Never near me...

[DaHat]

I live in a town of 6200 (Madison, SD) and highly doubt such a service would be available anywhere near me... let alone in the state.

Now the choice... the peace and quiet of small town life... or an uber fast internet connection... I think I'll stick with the small town life, stray bullets and not too bright criminals

Re:Never near me...

[CodeMaster]

This comment posted over a 36K modem dial link

Re:Never near me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cauz... they dont want white-trash desert dwellers learning how to build bombs on the Net..

duh..

FTTP

[vxvxvxvx]

2x the transport of FTP

Re:Article text for the lazy

[akeyes]

Darn! For once I read the article, then read the first post.

Last time I do that.

Price wars

[drpentode]

Don't you just love price wars and capitalistic competition? This is what makes America great!

Re:Price wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that also what pushes lot's of US jobs overseas?

Never in Washington

[Kalewa]

For all the press Washington and the Seattle area get for being a center of technology, we never get any of the cool technologies. Damn you, California!

Re:Never in Washington

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got the hippest new library on the planet and you talk about slow Internet service? Where are your priorities, man?

By the way, what is this Slashdot forum? Does it cater to literate discussions on the value of public projects like libraries? I certainly hope so.

Re:Never in Washington

[taustin]

Seattle may be a center of technology, but Orange County (which is where Huntington Beach is) is the most wired county in the US.

Deal with it. luser.

Re:Never in Washington

[Anonymous Coward]

Go tell Bill, it's his fault!!!!

Re:Never in Washington

[sleighb0y]

I got a 100Mbps pipe from Clallam County PUD.

Never say never.

And never will I never have to wonder if the slow download is on my end again, it never is.

Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[vijayiyer]

I'm sure that they'll have clauses that it's for entertainment only and give you a dynamic IP with most ports blocked. What's the use of that kind of bandwidth then? I'd rather get 1.5 mbps from a place like Speakeasy which allows me to get work done. (Note: Not a plug, not even a happy customer - more of a customer-to-be)

Re:Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[Wesley Felter]

I'm sure a lot of people will be happy to leech warez, pr0n, MP3s, and movies (the four horsemen of the broadband apocalypse) at 10+ Mbps. But you're right, it has nothing to do with getting work done.

Re:Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[ceswiedler]

Speakeasy is great. They have a great range of services from 56k to 3.0/768, and they don't give a rat's ass what you do with your connection as long as it's legal.

Re:Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[Pvt_Waldo]

What's so insightful about the post above? It's just somebody's pessimistic comments about what he thinks might be true. Now post me some links of other providers who do the same thing or proof Verizon has this in mind, and I might think otherwise...

Re:Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[j1m 5n0w]

What's so insightful about the post above? It's just somebody's pessimistic comments about what he thinks might be true. Now post me some links of other providers who do the same thing or proof Verizon has this in mind, and I might think otherwise...

Have you ever read Verison's terms of service?

You may not use the Broadband Service to host any type of server personal or commercial in nature.

Translation: We don't believe in the end-to-end nature of the Internet. Consume all you want, but don't even think about producing something!

This probably doesn't matter to most people, but it irks me when companies try to turn the Internet into interactive television.

-jim

Re:Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections

[Lehk228]

Actual translation

Go ahead and do what you want but don't fucking call us and bitch because you fucked up the configuration on your FTP server and "The internet is broken" because your FTP was turned into a warex site by some 1337 h4x0rs

vs Wiresless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why build an entire new fiber infrastructure when wireless speeds are doubling in speed and distance every two years? 802.16 is close to going into the public sector. I know it doesn't provide the speed of fiber yet but by the time they get these fiber runs completed, wireless will as fast or faster.. Plus, maintaining a few transmitters will cost hundreds of millions less than a miles of fiber cabling.. Providers in our area are already offering wireless Internet & Voice. Video wont be far behind..

Re:FT-T-T-T-TP

[DaHat]

Wouldn't that be the stuttering version of FTP?

Fine Print..

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

It's all well and good until you read
A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35
towards the end of the article. It's not exactly $1 per mbps.

Still, exciting.. More competition is good. Lets hope the upstream capabilites are very good as well.

Re:Fine Print..

[vxvxvxvx]

15mbps for $45.. that's pretty darn good! Not $1 per mbps, but I'd buy it anyway.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[gcaseye6677]

If they do things correctly, they can offer television packages that give customers a real choice, as opposed to the cable monopoly. For example, have a no-ESPN package that costs significantly less than standard cable. Google on ESPN and cable TV for more info on how ESPN is the single most expensive channel on your cable bill. Then it will be possible to get a decent TV package for less than $50 a month. Whatever they do, it's about time somebody breaks up the Comcast monopoly over cable TV in most of the US.

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Nowhere in your anti-verizon rant did you mention that verizon actually is not a good company. If they're a good company, what's wrong with them offering these services? I'd rather have a good company offering these services than a crap company.

Anyways, how is verizon a monopoly? They've been doing horribly the past few years, losing tons of marketshare to competing companies (People are abanonding POTS like never before).

Do you hate a company simply because it's a monopoly? Why is Verizon evil for being successful?

Only Florida, Texas, and California

[Anonymous Coward]

When will it be coming to the non-freak states?

Re:Only Florida, Texas, and California

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA. FTTP has already arrived in the non-freak states (with the exception of CA (the land of fruits, flakes, and nuts) and FL (the land of people who can't work a freaking punch card ballot)).

Not the worst of that verbal slip

[Anonymous Coward]

quantum is also dervied from the word quanta - which is the SMALLEST possible increment of change you can make in a system- using int, 2 is a quantum leap away from 1. 3 isn't. Subatomic particles display this characteristic (like you can't have a spin of 1.235) which is why it's called quantum physics (primarily) So this usage of quantum leap is absolutely backwards.

Pricing

[Mistah Blue]

I'd be curious what the uplink speed is. I pay about $50/month for Comcast cable. This price includes all taxes and a fee for a separate bill (from my cable) so I can expense it. My speed is 3Mbps/256Kbps. So, it is definitely competitve if it is an async type connection, and very competitive if it a sync type connection.

Re:Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

you are thinking symmetric and asymmetric... not async and sync.

Re:Pricing

[Anonymous Coward]

That's expensive. I pay $39.95/month (Canadian, or about $30 USD) for 3M down/512K up. Tack on 14% tax on top, so around $34 US all in. And, back when I had a TV, they provided separate bills at no charge. At the very least, anything more than an extra $1/month is unreasonable.

Is this supposed to be a joke?

[supabeast!]

The idiots at Verizon can't even get my DSL working right, and now they're going to give me fiber? This is just ludicrous.

I'll never see broadband out in East Bumble.

[TwoPumpChump]

It's all well and good that Verizon is offering Yet Another last-mile solution, but for us insensitive clods out in the rural areas, we'll still never see any of it in our lifetimes. I live right on the border of two counties, which do not share some sort of necessary agreement to share cable providers. (I don't know the details other than Comcast telling me "We can't cross that line.") But all my other lines (Power, phone) come in from the adjacent county because there is no right-of-way cut alongside the road coming in from county I actually live in. So I'm stuck in some sort of mythical no-man's land of can't-get-cable, can't-get-DSL and I know ain't no way in hell Verizon or anyone else will ever lay cable out to us rural folks. What Verizon needs to push is not this damn fiber that'll only be deployed in the major cities and 'burbs, but their own wireless broadband option which could work anywhere. (And while I'm complaining, make it competative to DSL in pricing, at least.)

Re:I'll never see broadband out in East Bumble.

[Moofie]

So, they should stop serving the needs of high population density areas, which are profitable, and they should start running expensive cable out to the boonies, where it will be used by one person (you).

This is a dumb business model. It's unfortunate that you have chosen to live where you live, but it's one of the prices you pay for the rural lifestyle.

Re:I'll never see broadband out in East Bumble.

[TwoPumpChump]

So, they should stop serving the needs of high population density areas, which are profitable, and they should start running expensive cable out to the boonies, where it will be used by one person (you).

The high density areas can also be served by wireless broadband, which is my point... wireless can serve EVERYONE vs. wired which is inclined to favor the higher-density areas.

Re:I'll never see broadband out in East Bumble.

[Moofie]

Which wireless broadband system has the same cost/person to install in a metropolis, and out in the boonies?

Hint: There isn't one. The sunk cost to support (say) 1000 users is the same as the cost to support 10. And you might note that 10 people have less money than 1000 people.

(Yes, these numbers are made up.)

'Bout Time y'all find this!

[bigdady92]

As we've been working on this bad momma for the better part of 2 years! As one who sees the servers and equipment that they are using especially seeing the fiber that they will be putting into the ground this shit is faster than snake shit.

It's shame it's going to be useful only to those with NEW construction. Those with existing homes are shit out of luck, except in NY, LA, and Texas. And those commie bastards in Meadowpoint where the big bosses live. They always get the good shit.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[nelsonal]

The problem with that is that cable companies would each have to charge considerably more (ESPN gets about $2/mo from everyone others get up to $1 or so CSPAN and the house version get about a nickel). They survive with pricing like that because the cable company bundles them together. With full ala carte pricing ESPN would be one of the cheaper channels (due to it's higher popularity) and niche channels would probably be more like $5-$10 each. Meaning that you could only pay for the channels you watch but you would still pay $50 per month.

Did I miss something?

[Pii]

How come everyone in this thread is under the impression that this is an Asymmetric connection?

I read the article, and don't remember seeing anything that implied to difference between upload and download speeds.

Is there any reason to believe that this isn't a plain old 30Mbps pipe? (2/3rds of a DS3?)

Further, it there any reason to believe that this will be anything other than FastEthernet over fiber, with some rate limiting?

Re:Did I miss something?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Could be because every time a service provider has come out with a "better, more powerful" connection, that's the way it has been? History, and all of that sort of thing.

What's going on here is that they want to attract more consumer business, not cut into business business. The average consumer is not interested in high uplink rate, because what they are doing is downloading (pr0n?).

This is intended as a consumer product, to get consumer accounts. If it is used on the business side, you can assume because of past practices, that the uplink rate will be reflected in the cost.

Not any time soon...

[SuperBanana]

Either way, I am looking forward to it.

Don't get too excited. It's only coming to one town in Texas, then California, then Florida- and "2005" was in there somewhere- and rarely do those dates, especially when given that vaguely- mean anything. It most likely won't hit most major population centers until several years later, if at all; fiber gear is even more expensive than DSL gear, and with the US's low population density, even less likely to be profitable.

This is what I like to call a Trophy Rollout. DSL was the same way for me; I live about 25 minutes west of Boston, next to one of the richest communities in the state(thanks to all the execs, doctors, lawyers etc from Boston living there), but because AT&T Cable is in town, Verizon didn't want to compete against them, or they had a gentleman's agreement- but our CO has been wired for at least 4 years for DSL. We also don't have a choice in cable companies- it's cable, or satellite.

Within the last year or two, Verizon is finally offering service- but ONE plan, and no other ISPs save Verizon are offering service. 1.2Mbps/128kBit. Yes, 128kBit upload. Ie, useless for "sharing photos" or "sending files to work" etc. All this costs MORE than 3Mbit/384kBit offered by AT&T, which Verizon makes up for by marketing as "a line you don't share with all your neighbors." Sorry, but AT&T actually has plenty of capacity now, and I routinely get things like OS X software updates -at- 3Mbit/sec, on the dot(a friend and I theorize they set the cap a teensy bit over 3Mbit to account for protocol overhead). Yay, wonderful- except AT&T is draconian with their acceptable use policy, and can't keep their mail servers up worth a damn.

If I lived ONE town over, Framingham, for example- I could have my choice among about 5 different major providers/subproviders, including Speakeasy, Covad, Megapath, and a couple of Worcester based ISPs..and about 10 different residential and business rates.

How sad is it that I live right next door to the technology center of the east, but I have next to no choice in high speed internet access?

Re:Not any time soon...

[jrmann1999]

It's coming to Keller TX . As we speak they are pushing conduit down my street.

Re:Not any time soon...

[NeoSkandranon]

What photos are you sharing (or perhaps i should ask in what quantity) that 128Kbit up isnt fast enough?

Re:Not any time soon...

[cheezus_es_lard]

All I have to say is I HIT THE DAMN JACKPOT then, because Henkles and McCoy is out tearing up the utility easement in front of my house to push my new fiber. At this point I don't care WHAT I pay, I'm just so glad to have an option other than DSL (VZ dsl, btw, sucks MAJOR balls, I'm hoping their fiber speeds are better) since ComCast doesn't offer cable internet here yet. I'm excited at the ability to slap a few servers on a DMZ and run them from home with no bandwidth issues.

Also, while this may be a 'Trophy Project', in the industry we call it a 'Pilot Rollout'. (read 'dress rehearsal') You can't just run with something this massive.. developing processes, procedures, and then running through them in test situations is the only way to ensure that your customers get solid service after the main rollout kicks off. Most of the dot-coms didn't do that, which is why there are so many issues with scalability, sustainability and upgradeability with existing small-company DSL networks (there are a few decent ones out there, but they are diamonds in the rough).

I don't work for VZ, but have been a landline customer of theirs since moving into Tarrant County, so I honestly feel that it's impressive to see them making this kind of push to wire my city with fiber.. plus it doesn't hurt that we're very close to the VZ HQ and a lot of their execs live here... ;-)

Re:Not any time soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only coming to one town in Texas, then California, then Florida

YEAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

Re:Not any time soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

I shared my July 4th photos with a few friends. At 2MB a photo, it takes a while, even with 256kBps upload. People like to print photos, you know.

Re:Not any time soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your numbers are off.

Verizon speed tiers are:

1.5M/384K
1.5M/128K *
768K/128K ...

There is no 1.2M, that may be the throughput you get to a specific site, but your modem will be provisioned at 1.5M. Either that or you are are grand-fathered in from a company that verizon bought.

You should also know that if you currently have 1.5M/128K you can get an upgrade to 1.5M/384K for free. If you are currentl 768K/128K there is a good chance you can upgrade to 1.5M/364K too -- Verizon changed their distance requirements recently. Plus, you can reduce your bill to $30/month. I know this because I am a Mass Verizon DSL customer and I have done both in the last month just by calling 800-567-6789 and talking to the billing department. (yes billing, not tech support).

Re:Not any time soon...

[Hitmen]

Wow, that really sucks. I live in Framingham, and it was nice to have so many options, but actually making the choice is a bitch when it comes down to it. So far I've been really happy with RCN's service over the past few years though. 5Mbps(which they upgraded me to for free from the 3Mbps service when they rolled out the 5Mbps one)/800kbps for a reasonable price.... I'd suggest moving one town over.

Re:Not any time soon...

[hondo77]

Writing as a Verizon customer in Southern California...

YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Re:Not any time soon...

[LordMyren]

What photos are you sharing (or perhaps i should ask in what quantity) that 128Kbit up isnt fast enough?

ones bigger than a postage stamp

Re:Not any time soon...

[auspiv]

Would you really move one town over just for faster internet??

Re:Not any time soon...

[ZaMoose]

Heh. Wish I had some mod points to spend on this one.

Ahh, Howard Dean, how we miss thee. All the entertainment you brought to the election...

Since Da Coach isn't going to run for the IL Senate
seat, I guess I'm going to have to content myself with chuckling at Ah-nold calling CA Democrats "girlie-men".

Good on ya, AC.

Re:Not any time soon...

[jonadab]

> I'm just so glad to have an option other than DSL

Do you have any idea how long I've been *wishing* I had DSL as an option,
*hoping* it comes to my area, *waiting*, *wondering* if they're ever going
to get their act together and roll it out? If I could get DSL, the latency
would be decent enough for X11-forwarding between home and work. That would
*rock*. But it's not happening any time soon, apparently.

Re:Not any time soon...

[SlamMan]

I'm a freelance photographer. 128K up hurts.

Re:Not any time soon...

[Glonoinha]

Shit I moved half way across the country for faster Internet - TWICE (had v.32bis, moved somewhere to get 1.5Mb/s, then moved two years later again half way across the country to get 3.0Mb/s.) Granted both times were to start a new job, but the fat pipe in the new city was a contributing factor for taking the job both times.

Anybody that isn't willing to move one city over to score a decent connection ...

Lets say there are three tiers of people :
High tech
Low tech
Aztek

Re:Not any time soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

What photos are you sharing (or perhaps i should ask in what quantity) that 128Kbit up isnt fast enough?

It's not just photos. Anyone who works from home with either images or data sets will find anything slower then 384Kbps to be too slow. (384Kbps upload allows you around 150MB/hour.)

Being limited to 128Kbps means that instead of waiting 3 minutes to upload something, I'd have to wait 10 minutes.

Re:Not any time soon...

[WuphonsReach]

Would you really move one town over just for faster internet??

I would. But then I telecommute to work 95% of the time, so high speed access is very important.

Right now I'm considering a move to another state next year (time for a change in scenery). I'm dreading the hurdles involved in finding out what high-speed access is available as well as making sure that I can get it at a particular address.

Re:Not any time soon...

[auspiv]

Hmmmm... I guess I didn't think about why somebody would move for faster internet. I just have the viewpoint of a teen and it is to basically stay with friends. If you do your work via an internet connection, I guess it is important.

Re:Not any time soon...

[mcmonkey]

If I lived ONE town over, Framingham, for example- I could have my choice among about 5 different major providers/subproviders, including Speakeasy, Covad, Megapath, and a couple of Worcester based ISPs..and about 10 different residential and business rates.

The grass is always greener, I suppose. I live one town over, in Framingham. And I do have a choice for high speed net access. Comcast or RCN.

I don't know about your list of providers/subproviders, but if I wanted to go with any of those companies, or any DSL at all, I'd have to move. Maybe I'm too close to the town that's next to one of the richest communities in the state. Anyway, in my mind the choice between cable companies is kinda like the choice between Slinker and Stinker.

Some more details

[spludge]

http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/r elease.vtml?id=86053&PROACTIVE_ID=cecdcacdc7cdcbc6 cdc5cecfcfcfc5cececacccccac9c8cfc8c5cf

5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up for $34.95 a month as part of a calling package or $39.95 a month stand-alone.

15 Mbps down/2 Mbps up for $44.95 a month as part of a calling package or $49.95 a month stand-alone.

30 Mbps down/5 Mbps up , pricing will be announced at a later date.

Next stops on the rollout after Keller, TX (which is already rolled out) are Huntington beach, CA and Tampa, FL.

Re:Some more details

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the upgrades to the single T1 in the CO where you and your entire neighborhood terminate will be upgraded "at some time in the future". Remember folks, DSL and FTTP are not "shared"

Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

So now you get modded up for not only copying the article off of a news site and violating copywrites, not only doing so when the site isn't even slashdotted, but doing all of this while logged in so you can karma whore?

Grandparent is a recurring Troll, trying to boost his Karma back out of negative. Check his posting history.

Finally....

[Tree131]

I've been waiting for this for so long and it's finally here!!!

Pr()n at the speed of light... literally!!!

Re:Finally....

[gilrain]

Technically, that's only one bit of pron at the speed of light.

Those of us IN Keller, TX

[Anonymous Coward]

as a Keller, TX resident, I am excited. Its nice to watch the work crews bringing YOU the goods!

*evil laugh*

Re:Those of us IN Keller, TX

[ezHiker]

Are they rolling this out strictly in Keller? I live just a mile or so down in Watauga.

Good for MPAA/RIAA

[vxvxvxvx]

They could put into place a file distribution system similar to bittorrent and sell movies and music online with very small server overhead costs.

Wait, .. yah, I'm being dumbass, this is MPAA/RIAA..

Host my own server?

[Tibor the Hun]

For those of us too lazy to RTFA, are we allowed to legally host a for-profit webserver for the price of $35, or whatever else the basic package costs?

Because if I can't do that what would be my incentive to do it. I already have a hard time keeping up with all the pr0n i'm leaching.

Re:Host my own server?

[applef00]

For those of us too lazy to RTFA, are we allowed to legally host a for-profit webserver for the price of $35, or whatever else the basic package costs?

Because if I can't do that what would be my incentive to do it. I already have a hard time keeping up with all the pr0n i'm leaching.

The article doesn't say anything about allowing servers, etc. Personally, my incentive would be that I'm already paying $35/month for DSL from Verizon (with extremely low QOS--I have about 30 minutes of downtime a day, on average and my speed tops out around 80k), so if I can get a faster, more reliable connection for exactly the same price, why not?

Thats not the future, thats the present.

[tgd]

My parents have had that in their development in Scottsdale, AZ, since the day the development opened.

And it sucks. Badly. Its a fiberoptic line running into their house. Phone, TV and internet come off it.

There's no option for any service other than that, nothing else was installed there. The problem is the telco they use is bankrupt, and hasn't upgraded anything in five years, so they've got horrid picture quality on TV since its all poorly compressed, comparably low bitrate digital, the internet is spotty, and they have the honor of paying for it all even if they choose to get satellite.

Re:Thats not the future, thats the present.

[Carnildo]

Sounds to me like the problem isn't the FTTH. I think the problem is the bankrupt telco.

Re:Thats not the future, thats the present.

[tgd]

Right, but my point is the problem is "all your eggs in one basket".

You have one line into your house, you're at their mercy.

WOW

[pookguy]

How long with this take to reach my area in NY?
I always dreamed of a T3 line running into my house, but that was 7 years ago.

Don't you worry

[Anonymous Coward]

... even with fiber optics lines Verizon still will find a way to make it suck.

Not sure what it will be: poor upstream speed, ridiculous firewall restrictions, must-install client software, etc., but with Verizon you can be assured that the final result will suck.

Too Bad Verizon is Evil? You pay for the fiber!

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

First, I don't like this bundling of services. I want lockin in one area to constrain my choice.

Yes of course. This is obvious. But remember that Verizon is out there as a publicly traded company to make money. So while "lockin" may not be so hot for you if you like to shop a la carte, it is a necessary evil if you want to big for-profit company to pay for the infrastructure.

Is it symmetric?

[bigberk]

Does anyone know whether this thing is a symmetric or asymmetric IP service? There's a big difference :) I have a 3 Mbps ADSL service, but despite this it has limited functionality because my upstream bandwidth is so little (200 Kbps) which limits both upstream bandwidth and also limits downstream TCP/IP speed, because of the occasional ACKs required by TCP/IP.

Re:Is it symmetric?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's asymmetric (rtfa, etc), 2 Mbps up.

Your upload bandwidth will not be limiting your DL speed. Experiment - install NetLimiter, squeeze your upload, and it shouldn't change your download speed until you get to sub-5Kbps.

p.s. if you're looking for a nice large file to try this with, I suggest a linux iso :)
Knoppix is pretty.

I live in Keller

[MikeDataLink]

I live in Keller, TX. I've been waiting months for this to happen. I am very excited. I'll sign up for the fastest service the day it becomes available.

FTTP vs. FTTH

[Doc Ruby]

Verizon promises Fiber to the Premises, while many in the broadband biz talk about Fiber to the Home. The difference is unclear. But here in New York City, the literal premises could be one of our millions of multihome premises, some of which house thousands of homes. FTTP of 30Mbps shared by more than 10 homes, which is common even in the ubiquitous 5-storey apartment buildings, would offer the same bandwidth per home as the current cablemodem service of 3Mbps. Some premises might get a fiber bundle, but there's no guarantee. So cablemodem service seems likely to remain competitive, at least for a while.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[ffejie]

Well the truth is that FTTP does about 625 Mbps but VZ is splitting it over 10 homes or so. As a result, everyone can get up to 60 Mbps (when they need to roll out that service). In New York where there are large scale apartment buildings, expect a ton of fiber to be laid to the building, to keep the ratio correct. Verizon's dream here is to do television offerings, not match current cable bandwidth. If they want to stream HD Feeds (which they do) then they're going to need at least 10 Mbps to that one TV, plus whatever you need for internet. If I lived in a metropolis, I would be itching for this stuff. And with any luck, I'll be moving in a year to Boston.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[Kiryat Malachi]

Just like when those huge buildings (we have em in Chicago too) get wired for cable modems, they run multiple wires to maintain the proper ratio of subscribers to bandwidth.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[Detritus]

The maximum bit rate for a single ATSC HDTV stream is about 19 Mbps. If you want to support more than one TV/STB, you need enough bandwidth for multiple streams. You could use up 100 Mbps with three TVs and a fast Internet connection (40 Mbps).

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[n8_f]

FTTH has become FTTP, because we are delivering fiber to multi-use buildings, not just homes.

Generally, with a multi-dwelling unit, you would use a special CPE (customer premise equipment) made for that. Fiber is great for point-to-point links, but it isn't made for local distribution. For that, you use whatever existing infrastructure there is and CAT5. With FTTP, the fiber connection goes to a CPE at the building and then services are broken out from there. They could have an Ethernet port for Internet, a coax socket for TV, and a couple lines for POTS. For an MDU, the CPE would have multiple Ethernet ports for multiple subscribers. Each subscriber could get a 30MB connection (except if they did, the equipment would probably need to be upgraded).

(Current) cablemodem service won't be competitive (MSOs have been pushing fiber deeper and deeper into their networks; this will force them to get much closer to the home). Fiber is the future, but Verizon was only willing to do this after forcing the FCC to allow them to close their infrastructure to anyone else. Expect round two of the great telco monopolies in the next decade. I think the only solution is publicly-owned infrastructure, like the roads, with multiple service providers competing over it.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[Doc Ruby]

Sounds like there's a good opportunity here for geeks to organize our buildings into "network coops", wiring (or WiFi'ing) our buildings to connect to the fiber termination. And offering services, as long as they don't compete with the bundled ones from Verizon - or organizing with other coops to force those bundles open.

I believe that only governments should own monopolies of any kind, and that they should be locally accountable to the people in their captive market. Roads and railroads are a model, although the rails have been something of a travesty. In fact, I have heard that some telcos are trying to get out of the infrastructure biz, leaving it all to the governments, so they can just sell services over the lines. I wouldn't be surprised if they could get the governments to take over their depreciated infrastructure in exchange for keeping monopolies over bundled services in geographically segregated markets.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[n8_f]

Sounds like there's a good opportunity here for geeks

If you like wiring. Verizon isn't going to allow you to offer any services over their network. Don't forget, it is their network, not yours. Verizon and the telcos want to take us into the second Information Dark Age (the first was the AT&T monopoly).

I mostly agree with your sentiment about monopolies, although I think other public entities and non-profits qualify for controlling them. The keys are open, transparent, local control and accountability, and only controlling the part that would be a (natural?) monopoly (e.g., the fiber in this case, not the services running over the fiber).

In fact, I have heard that some telcos are trying to get out of the infrastructure biz, leaving it all to the governments, so they can just sell services over the lines.

No. The existing copper infrastructure is dead and they want to get rid of it. I think there are a couple of publicly owned telco projects that use copper, but only because they were started over a decade ago. Anything more recent than that is fiber or a hybrid fiber. The telcos want out of the copper infrastructure business, but they want all of the fiber infrastructure business. Remember, companies love monopolies, especially those companies that are addicted to them.

Re:FTTP vs. FTTH

[Doc Ruby]

If you like wiring.

That's what makes (some of) us geeks :).

Verizon isn't going to allow you to offer any services over their network.

They already "allow" Slashdot to offer us services over their networks. And Microsoft, with IE, from the client end. Verizon would of course love to offer all the business over their Internet infrastructure. But their execs realize that they can't offer all the apps, and certainly won't take the risk of offering all the apps when many/most of them fail to become profitable. Apps sell infrastructure, and that's the model the telcos are working with. So that opportunity might very well exist, scaling up/out from its current beginnings.

Re:Lazy .. like George W. Bush

[bigdady92]

there's been plenty of outcry but it's all drowned out by the "WE HATE BUSH! BUSH ==TEH DEVIL!" rhetoric that's been propogating everywhere.

I for one am irked that my voice in the Senate is not being heard and that they'd rather go on trying to be president instead of my representative.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

and violating copywrites

Okay.

doing so when the site isn't even slashdotted

Right...he should wait until the site is slashdotted, and THEN post it, right? So the rest of us will have to sift through the hundreds of comments just to find his link including the text. Hrmmm.

but doing all of this while logged in so you can karma whore?

If you take things like 'Karma level on slashdot' this seriously, I'd hate to see what you're like in actual socially organized team sports, etc. Seriously buddy....you need to unplug for a week or so and straighten out what really matters.

How do you spell "NO!" ???

[Sparkle]

I have only been trying for 4 or 5 years to get something better than POTS from Verizon. Live in service area of a CO that is one outside of Austin metro. Answer?

No, no, no! No DSL, no ISDN, just forget it. I will be taking my eternal dirt nap before Verizon brings me any fiber.

Stability? Redundancy?

[AtariDatacenter]

I wonder how stable or redundant FTTP will actually be? For example, a month or two ago, we had a major storm blow through the city. Lots of power outages everywhere. Happily, the cable company has battery backups built into their signal distribution units way up on some of the poles in the field. Result? No instant Internet outage.

Then, sometime later, the batteries WERE exhausted. What did the cable company do? They got their trucks with generators and parked them by the distribution nodes and fed them power until the mains were restored. And that kept analog cable, digital cable, and Internet connectivity alive.

I'm no shill for the cable company, but I'm a lot less on their case after COX took over my local provider (who hated ever fiber of their customer base). COX runs a tight ship and I know that they've got the means to support this stuff, because it is everyday technology that they use.

I'm not so confident with FTTP from the local telco. A new offering isn't usually the most robust.

YES!

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad Verizion probably won't install it where I live in Ohio. This would be SAWEET!

The dictionary is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

Merriam-Webster says you're wrong. Gee, who to trust?

Main Entry: quantum leap
Function: noun
: an abrupt change, sudden increase, or dramatic advance

Awww Crap....

[Entropy248]

Imagine a thousand spammers moving, no running towards a small town in Texas for FTTP (which really is an almost purposefully confusing name). Now you know why there are restrictions.

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[Tumbleweed]

Well, now your IM session connections will be fast enough that you can actually spell all the words you use. Say goodbye to :) and hello to 'smile.' Yay!

Cable companies do this already.

[teeker]

At least Comcast does. Evil as some people think they are, you can get a pretty good deal on their services in my area. One line into the house, to a box at the demarc which gives cable TV, broadband internet, and phone jacks. It works great in my house. YMMV of course.

is it me or is Verizon setting the standard.

[Brigadier]

probable two years ago I spoke with a friend who worked at verizon who told me verizon is planning to impliment what was then thier $30 a month DSL package. I've since signed up for thier total package which basically gives me DSL for $28 a month. my LD and local is very competitive the service is excellent. Now this monopoly or not Verizon has really been doing quite a bit to fuel broad band use. I for one appload them, neither earthlink Covad or anyone else comes close.

personally I'm waiting for them to role out local ld, dsl, and digital TV over Fiber and give me a rate cheaper than what i'm paying charter cable. brig it on.

Re:FT-T-T-T-TP

[maskedbishounen]

All of the s(p||c)ammers are signing up now. . .or would, but they want the ISP to sign up for their escrow service. :/

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[vxvxvxvx]

smile

Sounds great.

[dosius]

As a Verizon customer, I welcome this (can we say "fiberoptic overlords" anyone?), but question is, will I ever see it here in Niagara Falls, NY? I'll sure as hell be willing to lay out the mondo smackers for 30 Mbps fiber, as I do a lot of filesharing on IRC and BT.

Moll.

Re:Sounds great.

[nolife]

will I ever see it here in Niagara Falls, NY?

Just call and ask. I'm sure they will tell you:
"It is not currently in your area but they are [upgrading/finishing/finalizing/testing] the service now, it should be available within the next [soon/week/month] so please keep checking back. Can I interest you in our [dialup/DSL/long distance/wireless] service?"

I heard that same thing from Verizon and Comcast in my area for almost 24 straight months of my checking on DSL and CM access. I've stopped calling since Comcast finally moved in but Verizon DSL is STILL not in my area even after 2 more years and I still get the junk mail asking me to sign up.

Deployment in Massachusetts

[Willy K.]

On Friday morning, I was leaving my house, headed to work. I noticed that some contractors were digging up the phone pedestal on my lawn next to the sidewalk. I stopped to interrogate them, being a good paranoid Slashdotter.

They said they were prepping the street for Verizon to come in and lay fiber. Now I live in North Reading, and this guy claimed that mine is the first town in the state to be getting Fiber to the home. He claimed that they would be offering service in my area before the end of the year.

Needless to say, I'm very excited. With prices like that, I'll definitely switch from Comcast. I like Comcast, but I like bandwidth more, especially upload, since I work remotely and host a few small websites from my home.

Re:Deployment in Massachusetts

[Woody77]

From talking to the Comcast techs doing the install, my area supposed got the 90V upgrade to be able to finally do cable-modems at high speed, but we've not been turned on. No idea why.

SBC had plans drawn up, and a site surveyed for a remote CO to get DSL out in my area (I'm 5 miles from the CO). But no dice there, either. Seems like a couple hundred homes is all it would take to make it worth their while for the remote CO. And I'd gladly pay $100/mo for any form of broadband. I'm on a 26K modem. I can ISDN, but that's over $100/mo after all the fees (the line itself is $80/mo).

Terms of use?

[j1m 5n0w]

But can you run a server or share with your neighbors?

-jim

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[Fareq]

Ok, I'll bite.

1: Large-scale distribution of material to which *I* own the copyright. Maybe I wrote a book, maybe I made a movie or a videogame, or maybe I wrote some usefull piece of software.

2: Large-scale distribution of copyright material with the express permission of the copyright holder(s). (for instance, Linux ISOs)

3: High-Speed distribution of files from my computer at home to other computers around the world (kind of like an external hard drive that I dont have to carry).

4: Downloading something that I just bought (software, in the future perhaps a movie) in seconds instead of minutes/hours.

5: Downloading something free in seconds/minutes instead of hours (Linux ISOs, patches & updates for various software applications)

6: Network no longer a consideration or limitation in the implementation of video games, this also decreases the need to waste CPU power compressing & reformatting the data for network transmission.

7: Set up a media streaming service that allows me to watch any movie or listen to any song that I own from anywhere around the world (authentication required so that its only me)

8: Run permanent servers for all your favorite games all at the same time (one or two per computer, times how ever many computers you have)

9: Infinitely many fascinating new uses for global-scale networks that nobody ever thought of because the amount of data generated was so absurd that it was dismissed as "try again in 2150"

10: Really interesting new types of distributed computing, such as the SETI project, which can have individual machines on the network communicate with each other during processing. It will now be possible to send both to the initiating server and to other clients, large quantities of data generated from whatever the current "work unit" is.

11: Name anything that a business might want with high-speed internet service, add the words "home-based" in front of the word "business"

12: This message would post to slashdot in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, or something like that.

I need to get back to work, so I will leave this list off here, but if I had to I could go on.

I'm dead serious about this too... It'd be really cool to have my external hard drives with me wherever I go without having to lug 7 pounds of crap with me, just because I have 200 GB of stuff that I might want. Just because people would use the item to commit crimes does not mean that it is a criminal device.

Consider: A crowbar is used for more than just theft.

A gun is used for more than just murder.

A camera/photocopier/scanner/printer/... is used for more than juist making illegal copies of printed materials.

A computer is used for more than copyright infringement.

The internet is used for more than copyright infringement. In fact, it is used for legitimate businesses all the time. (see Amazon.com, or iTunes Music Store, or eBay, or ...)

</rant>

-- Fareq

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[Anonymous Coward]

32 - 64 person FPS Game Server

Too bad it's Verizon.

[Bob_Robertson]

Too bad it's Verizon. Oh well, more ethical companies will follow in their footsteps. When I was living in Tokyo two years ago, fiber to my apartment was $5/month on top of service. But DSL was 8Mbps, who cared to pay the extra?

Boycott of Verizon Communications, by Carl Bussjaeger

North American Samizdat - BOYCOTT VERIZON! Free Hunter!

End the War on Freedom - Verizon Must Die

Bob-

Just called

[jarito030507]

I just called my local Verizon office and they really had very little idea of what I was talking about. The manager told me that it would be available in a month or two and put me on a waiting list to be called when the order was available. This is in Bethlehem, PA. No more information about the pricing or upload or anything, though.

Re:Just called

[The Analog Kid]

I live in Yardley, PA, I heard the first test areas are around Bergan County, NJ, somewhere in Florida, and somewhere in Texas. Hopefully Verizon won't fuck PA over again, after PA gave so many incentives for Verizon to build a broadband network in state.

Re:Just called

[LinuxHam]

YARDLEY!?!?!? Me too! My development off Heacock can *never* get DSL b/c they ran fiber from the CO by the duck pond to our distribution point and then copper to the units. The Verizon CSR suggested that I walk up to the Verizon truck with a $20 bill (or a sandwich) if I see some guys working and ask them to try to track down any unused pairs that may have been run straight thru for some now-unused ISDN.

I didn't need the $20 when I asked, but the guys couldn't find any pairs. My Comcast cablemodem has been doing fine for a couple years now, and work pays for it. Is that your Saturn I've seen around town with all the /. stickers all over it?

Re:Just called

[sagenumen]

I live in Bethlehem, PA, too (the wonderful Southside) and when compared to other towns with a similar population density, our broadband sucks. As far as DSL is concerned, we're just lucky because the CO is near the denser parts of town so it seems like a whole mess of people can get 1.5/768 service. As far as cable goes (which I would prefer), you can't get two-way in the majority of town. RCN and Service Electric really need to pick up the pace. With all the students in B'hem, one would think these companies would jump at the chance to service at least all the streets within a couple blocks of campus.

Re:Just called

[jratcliffe]

Initial trials are in Keller TX, Huntington Beach CA, and Tampa FL. They didn't say aye or nay on doing anything in PA this year on the conference call, but they did say that NJ will _not_ be included this year. Looks like they're starting out with the old GTE properties, since there are fewer potential regulatory entanglements there.

Re:What about Upload speed? Static IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because, silly. Home users are morons who have nothing better to do than download entertainment "content", gawp at banner ads and digest daily propaganda, just don't tell big brother I told you that or^&*( ` *& [LOST CARRIER]

Monopolies suck

[Anonymous Coward]

I might, if it wasn't for the fact that in most places, there is very little to no competition. For example, where I live (city of 150,000), there's DSL, but it only serves about 15% of the area with no plans to expand that before early 2006, and there's only one ass raping cable company option for the rest.

Property prices

[catalupus]

I can't help wandering how this sort of connection will start effecting house prices, ie cheaper areas in a town because they are without Broadband. Incidentally, I live in Campbell - next door to San Jose, as in Silicon Valley, and I can't even get DSL or Cable modem. Dial up speed is about 28k, and it's not my modem - that gets 48k at work.

Re:Property prices

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help wandering how this sort of connection will start effecting house prices, ie cheaper areas in a town because they are without Broadband. Incidentally, I live in Campbell - next door to San Jose, as in Silicon Valley, and I can't even get DSL or Cable modem. Dial up speed is about 28k, and it's not my modem - that gets 48k at work.

I'll never buy a house where there's not at least two competing broadband services.

Verizon != Verisign

[Anonymous Coward]

You illiterate dipshit.

Re:If slashdotters have any consistency...

[Anonymous Coward]

You've heard of the Alpha Geek and the Alpha Nerd.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Alpha Idiot.

unless...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a friendly residence within a reasonable distance where your business can put drop and a WAP.

(knock knock)

Who's there?

Broadband!

Who?

Free Broadband Internet!
:-- Anchor the mesh

Re:Article text for the lazy

[John Courtland]

You have to realize that's all greed. It has absolutely nothing to do with feasibility. I remember the 1980's, with 1-800-CABLE-ME, where these guys were claiming "commercial free television." That turned out to be a load of bunk. Let 'em figure out how to make it work or let 'em burn.

upstream cap

[swerk]

I'm with you; my DSL costs more than the 15 Mbit service mentioned in the article and has a pathetic upstream cap. It wouldn't bug me quite as much if I didn't know it was a totally artificial and arbitrary limit.

I understand ISPs' arguments that Joe Shmoe users shouldn't run web/ftp/shell/mail servers on their $499 WinXP boxes, but come on! Joe Shmoe ain't gonna pay $60 a month for his internet link either! It used to be an ISP would give you your login credentials and a pile of software for everything from ftp to gopher to telnet to usenet. Now you're given an autorun CD that splatters the ISP's logo onto IE, overwrites your prefs and tells you to think of the internet as a TV you can click on.

Perhaps when another killer P2P app comes along, one that doesn't get crushed and forced into selling out *coughnapster* perhaps demand for real, two-way internet throughput will reach a level ISPs will care about. Something like Squeak perhaps, but with that special-something that makes it a killer app.

I suggest P2P as a possible catalyst for upstream equality, but it could be anything really. For a while I thought blogging might do it, but people don't seem to mind not being in total control of their blogs (hell, I even don't) so I guess I'll keep my fingers crossed as each Next Big Thing® crops up. :^)

To put it in more useful units...

[LesPaul75]

30 Mbps is like having a hundred thousand 300 baud modems!

Hmmm... You know, that's actually an interesting milestone. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was actually using a 300 baud modem. This is a five-orders-of-magnitude increase in something like a decade and a half.

Re:To put it in more useful units...

[Anonymous Coward]

You were at 300 baud in 1989? Poor sap!
I stopped using 300 baud in about 1985 and even then, it was mostly an oddity on campus that I just wanted to experience for the heck of it.

Re:To put it in more useful units...

[LesPaul75]

Yeah, you're right. It's more like 2 decades. That's roughly 240 months, divided by 18 gives about 13.333... So 2^13.333 is about 10000, which means that Moore's Law is almost perfectly accurate here. Maybe it really is a "Law" after all. :)

Re:To put it in more useful units...

[LesPaul75]

Oops... It's still off by a factor of ten. I'll just shut up now.

Re:If slashdotters have any consistency...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Verisign, not Verizon.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you just take that time out of your day to post a rebuttal to a post marked as Funny?

You realize that news.com has sustained slashdotting before, being a large commercial site, right?

Besides, this is slashdot. The vast majority of us are never going to be on a socially organized team sport. If you are, good for you. I don't fucking care.

YHBT. YHL. HAND.

Re:If slashdotters have any consistency...

[reiggin]

Take some karma and trade in for a CLUE!

Advantage: CA

[gphinch]

So we get nice weather, beautiful beaches, hot women, AND FTTP? Suckers!

Re:Advantage: CA

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't however have WATER for much longer so the rest of it won't do you any good.

'rural' Washington state residents...

[sleighb0y]

Check with your local Public Utility provider. Here in Clallam County, WA Clallam County PUD provides 100Mbps full-duplex Internet or P-t-P connections and is part of Noanet's network.

They use 95th percentile billing, it's not going to be $40 a month, but its not a meager 30Mbps either.

Cable modem

[mysterious_mark]

They can have my cable modem when they pry it from my cold dead fingers! Another chance to screwed by Verizon, on boy! I really miss those guys now that I have VOIP. As usual you can expect what you actually pay to be several times the advertised $35./month, typical Verizon scam. Really, I do hope all the Verizon CEO's starve to death, free yourself get VOIP! Death to Verizon! (former Verizon customer)

um.. no

[Anonymous Coward]

can you pump the equivalent of a hundred oc-192 circuits blended into one fibre line (not that we'll actually need that kind of bandwidth anytime soon) through an 802.16 link? no. fiber provides us with a long-lasting solution that has incredible bandwidth. and then there's the people who'd raise fits about high-power wireless crap beaming stuff around them and causing cancer like there's no tomorrow.

Re:If slashdotters have any consistency...

[Anonymous Coward]

I need a new option for moderation maybe "Idiotic" would cover this.

You are ALL WRONG on EMAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon may filter outgoing SMTP traffic, but I have never encountered that problem. In fact, my own web-hosting service just started blocking SMTP from my Verizon IP address claiming it was on a black-hole list.

So I had to figure out how to use verizon's servers, it was remarkably easy. Set your smtp host to outgoing.verizon.net and then set it to use authentication of your verizon login and password. Once you do that, you are free to use any From: address you want. I know this because I checked it. Not only that, but the the only sign that your email passed through verizon's servers are a couple of Received: lines, otherwise there is nothing to indicate to the casual reader that you sent email from a verizon account rather than whatever your From: email address says.

long distance

[zogger]

why break them up? Because when they were monopolies they got to be price gougers and slowed way down on the innovations and upgrades and just wallowed around in profit slop for years, and masses of people complained about it, and finally they got broken up. I remember paying at and t LD rates , sheesh o rama, you didn't talk long to grandma, tell ya whut... you didn't own your own phone either, you leased it from your telco, and paid it off over and over again for years. Electric deregulation, no idea, I never saw it go down ever, just gradually goes up. I don't think it was really deregulated, I think they just made it easier for hordes of new middle men commodity trader skimmers to cut out lucrative slices of it. City gas, don't use it,I use propane and get it in the summer when it's cheaper. Last I used natgas in a house it was allegedly deregulated,so I checked out the so called competition, and all the prices were almost identical, there was no practical difference that I could see so I stayed with the same company.

As to airlines, I don't have to fly really, last time I flew was a long time ago, like 10 years and I (would potentially) boycott them now since 9-11 turned everyone in the nation but the government (the real crooks) into a terrorist. I am not digging on "you are guilty by default" by those bozos, just the thought of it is abhorrent, the airlines and big bro can byte me, I'll drive. I know some people like ya'all and other business folks *must* fly, oh well, guess that's what you will put up with then. I thought by now everyone would be telecommuting anyway, maybe this fiber to the house idea will catch on and a lot more people will do that. I'll certainly get it if it ever shows up. I know my local phone guys told me (a few months ago when I had POTS installed) there's fiber all the way to the nearest switch box, so I asked them when they were going to offer it to the individual homes down the road,because I was interested in broadband, they said "never, no way, unless they are ordered to by the government". And dsl is out, too far away and they have all the twisted pairs maxed out, I don't know the nitty gritty tech details, something about they "share" the lines or something because of the new houses down the street. So I got fiber a bit over two miles away, and my chances of getting any broadband will be wireless or wireless, that's it.

Point is moot anyway,back to the airlines, we are *one* unpredictable wildcard event away from airline travel being too costly for all but the government and ultra rich. It wouldn't take much for oil to get to 100-150$ a barrel, just another random war (probably happen whenever we provoke iran enough for the next war to start) in the mideast or some massive domestic terrorist deal happening. Probably happen late summer or early fall is my best guess at this point.

Thinking about it,just your situation in general,as it applies to everyone who know travels with the airlines a lot for business, it *might* be a good idea to develop a non travel work around for it "now", as a backup solution so you don't have to scramble to create if something weird hits.

Holy Shiiiii...

[penginkun]

Just imagine a Beowul...sorry, wrong topic.

8^)

Anyway, I'm guessing this won't be available anywhere within a 500 mile radius of Santa Monica, because that's where I live and I NEED a fatter pipe. We switched from cable to DSL (BIG mistake) in January because it was half the cost (but 1/5th the speed, alas) and I've been dying a slow and miserable death ever since.

Re:What about Upload speed? Static IP?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 Reasons i know of

a) there is pretty high overhead with uploading on cable, or so iv heard

b) a telco/cable company gets ~5000/mbs worth of connection, if they sell out that and still have 4000 left worth of upstream space, well, sell webhosting etc.

Cynical point of view

[Captain Spam]

Cute press release. I'm waiting for the press release stating their equally enticing terms of service. Like stating you can't host any sorts of servers, they'll cut you off if you're downloading too much, all your privacy are belong to Verizon, etc...

In this case, I take the cynical point of view that, for the power user or system administrator (so, most of the reading audience at Slashdot), it'll turn out to be little more than a speed benchmark. I'd rather hear what you're allowed to do with this line rather than just a speed and cost figure.

quantum leap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or is everyone using the term " quantum leap" incorrectly? Isn't a quantum leap the smallest change possible? How can we stop these bozos?

"Pedestal" perhaps?

[Migraineman]

"FTTP" used to mean Fiber To The Pedestal - the local distribution point for a community or apartment building. That was an architectural offshoot from things like SLC huts and buried distribution vaults. The "pedestal" architecture ties in to the Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) cost optimization. They run the expensive fiber to a distribution pedestal, then coax or twisted pair for the customer connection.

Granted, "premesis" makes it sound like it's coming right up to your doorstep. I'll bet there's a greasy marketing weasel behind the terminology selection.

Re:"Pedestal" perhaps?

[n8_f]

No, FTTP now means Fiber To The Premise and it is exactly how it sounds: a fiber-optic cable all the way to your house, business, or MDU. The difference from FTTH is just the last two, i.e. the greasy marketing weasel realized FTTH was unnecessarily limiting their market.

Yet More Broadband I Can't Get

[merikus]

With all this talk of new and exciting broadband options available to us, I am still on a crappy dialup account (currently connecting at 31200 bps). I live in Vermont, on the side of a mountain, and not a single broadband provider has offered broadband to myself or my neighbors.

It seems silly to me that Verizon and other broadband providers are simply ignoring broad swaths of rural America. Yes, perhaps due to population density it doesn't seem so profitable. But I know quite a few people (including myself) who would jump at anything which is priced lower than satellite.

Much of rural America was simply ignored during the digital revolution. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Bah.

Can you *use* it tho?

[EvilStein]

Or are they going to treat it like a typical ADSL connection by forbidding servers on the line and blocking port 25?

Remember "Winfirst" near Sacramento, CA? They offered fiber to the home - 10mbit - they went under, and Surewest (formerly Roseville Telephone) bought them out.
Nice packages, but you're not allowed to run servers. They apparantly get *really* pissed if you try.. no servers, 1 dynamic IP for computers, etc.
Bandwidth is nice, but some of us actually do want to be able to use it.

whenever....

[tacocat]

I'm still waiting for DSL to show up.

Will they offer static IP's or is that going to be extra?

Now that I think about it, I was in a meeting with Verizon where there discussed having IP addresses for their telephone network, but they were planning on putting everything into one massive subnet. If this is the same network then you might not want it. It might make going onto the internet really painful.

30mbps.. is this synchronous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any word on what the uprate is, and what kind of hosting you can do?

Don't hold your breath

[CBob]

A few random grouchy points...

To quote Verizon " Verizon Online DSL Is Not Available" when my phone number is plugged in.

Fiber was run down my street 4 years ago and remains as accessable now as it was 5 years ago.

DSL is a vague 80's concept that has had "Great Promise" for all that time with almost no delivery. Anyone remember Popular Electronics?

Comcast took 4 years of "Coming Soon" and I knew it was online before the account reps did.

Comcast's initial success in this area of internet access nearly crushed it and did crush its zombie spawn/mate/??? @Home.

These firms seem to some survive despite thier best efforts not to. Verizon wanted to dump the "small" T1's in this area of NJ (AC-ish) just a few years ago. The co I work for promptly began looking for microwave links as a response.

Long term planning/plans? Don't expect that from any big biz today, they lack the ability to plan 90 days ahead, let alone a few years for a rollout.

30Mbps for $40 a month

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll dump my comcrap as soon as Verizon start to offer it here.

Who pays for the fiber?

[Domino]

The article doesn't at all talk about how the fiber gets into the ground. That little detail seems pretty important to me. Putting it there costs millions, especially if you get it to every home. I just can't see how this will ever be widely available. Does anybody have any information on this?

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[whittrash]

Video on demand is a legit use.

Re:Article text for the lazy

[synaptik]

You have to realize that's all greed. It has absolutely nothing to do with feasibility. I remember the 1980's, with 1-800-CABLE-ME, where these guys were claiming "commercial free television." That turned out to be a load of bunk. Let 'em figure out how to make it work or let 'em burn.

Either you didn't read the post you were replying to, you didn't understand it, or you replied to the wrong post. The post you replied to said nothing about 'feasibility'. What it said was that-- due to economics-- you would end up paying no less for a la carte programming than you presently do for the packages. As it exists today with the packages, high-demand channels like ESPN subsidize the cost of lower-demand channels. Take away the packages, and suddenly ESPN becomes cheap, and the cost of PBS, CSPAN, and H&GTV will skyrocket. ...Then they die, because they lose too much viewership, and can't sell ads.

I fail to understand how your '1-800-CABLE-ME' comments support your position.

Of course it's greed. Greed is the lube of the economy. Cable and satellite companies aren't providing their signal for philanthropic reasons.

FTTP iss newws?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahh! I'vve beenn downnloading wwith thatt forr yearrs!

How they do it! Know before you order!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Knowing Verizon, their solution for that speed will be to give you 240 ISDN modems shot-gunned together.

percent wize

[LordMyren]

1 mill / 260 million americans = ~ 0.39% of the US. thats a conservative estimate for population.

of those 260 million, there are about 46 million (again, conservative) broadbanders. your odds suddenly "jump" to 2.17%.

next slashdot poll:
if 2% of current broadbanders got fibre within 12 months.....

I'd be more excited if I didn't get this....

[questforme]

We're Sorry
Sorry, this product/products are not available in your state.

This would've been perfect for one of my customers.

fore-warning

[LordMyren]

just a little psa:

you will NEVER get the pipe you pay for.

your ISP is playing the role of an insurance company where your price stays the same but they can (behind the scenes) control the service they give you (bandwidth monitoring).

thats the wonder of free market economics. its suicide to not cap the upper 5%; its a margin you loose on and dont have to accept.

upper 5% for life!
Myren

I WILL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT!!!

[ferrellcat]

Oh boy! Another claim of bringing high speed connections to the masses!

Do I have access to Digital Cable? NO! Comcast has "no plans" of adding new infrastructure to my area.

Do I have access to DSL? Well yes...sorta. On a good day, when the wind is blowing right, and the stars are in the proper alignment, I will acheive a stunning 200kbps download on my DSL connection.

Now you may ask, do I live in the boonies?

No.

I live 1.3 miles from EBAY's north San Jose campus.

Like I said, I WILL BELIEVE IT WHEN I SEE IT!

this'd be great if their phone service were better

[DeprecatedFeature]

Speaking as a rural customer in Nowhere, NC, I can tell you guys that Verizon has emphasized cost cutting so much these last few years that their service is um, well, awful. While all my neighbors on BellSouth can get DSL, I am trapped having to use satellite Internet.
When I did have (another large networking provider) 56K lease line to my house that Verizon had to tend, their help desk guys did not believe that I had a circuit and would argue with me about this when I mentioned it in calling in my down phone (also working, according to them). Magically, my phone and circuit would be healed at 900 the next day, when the tech at the CO would get the ticket.
To me, it appears that Verizon does not have enough money allocated to tech support personnel at this time; I cannot even imagine what their support will be like if they really do roll out this level of access on a broad scale.

Re:GIMME

[mistert2]

I hope you live in a city, country Verizon users can not get anything but dial-up and yes I am close enough to the switch. Cable does feel the need to provide service, even though I am within their connection distance. I guess I should just get laggy satellite.

Can the marketing weasels handle it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection

Yup. Can I sell you a brand new Mercedes for $3 as well? Oh, there are a few minor details...

Understand that for a residential broadband customer, the industry has a target of approx. $220 per month per subscriber. Subscribe to Cox telephone, high-speed Internet and digital TV and you'll discover you're at $220 in no time (short term promotions and other marketing ploys aside).

Do you really think you're going to get a commercial 3 Mbps+ sustained link for the cost of an AOL dialup and second home line? Check out upstream capacity costs, let alone the leased circuits the upstream must pay for to carry your packets to wherever they're going. Even that little bit of fiber around town isn't cheap.

Remember the maxim: If it's too good to be true...

Re:Article text for the lazy

[John Courtland]

In the 80's, the cable company (specifically, the commercials on public TV with the 1-800-CABLE-ME number) said, "You won't have to watch commercials, because you pay for the channels." Then they snuck commercials in, I can only guess at the reason why.

Fast forward to now, they say "oh, you can't have seperate channels, because it would cost too much per channel." This is just simply cast off, by you at least, as being "due to economics." I call bullshit.

They have advertising to pay for the channel, but then why does the consumer pay? Or vice versa, why is there advertisement when the consumer is forced to pay, and the rates increase almost every year? Either cable TV is VERY inefficient, or someone has been making far too much money for far too long off of a product and is now trying their damnedest to hold on to a dying business model, via this "a la carte is expensive" crap.

And this, "Greed is the lube of the economy," shit is the precise reason this country is going to hell. Anything for a dollar. Disgusting.

pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, in the Japanese country side, I have 100 Mbps fiber to my home, for the equivalent of $50 and sustained throughputs of up to 30 Mbps. When living in San Diego I was lucky to have cable modem at 2.5 Mbps throughput for $50. The USA is a third-world country wrt to Internet connectivity.

Re:pathetic

[Anonymous Coward]

You stupid ass. 2.5 is still a great speed, considering the alternatives. Still, would people in Afganistan compain about 256k ISDN?

Moron.

Re:pathetic

[paehler]

feeling a little bit jealous? happen to live in the Unconnected States of America (aka USA)?

great service but what about caps...

[zxflash]

badnwidth limits could change my opinion about the service... i'd love to have the fiber but if you could theoretically drain your dl quota in a few days time the service isn't worth it... still, it's nice to see a company building out new infrastructure...

DSL2

[zxflash]

what if dsl2 ever gets off the ground in the u.s. and how about wi-max (802.16)... it would be nice to see some price deflation in the hi-speed access arena...

And the upstream will still be 300kbit..

[cbreaker]

Can't be running SERVERS now! That would be a bad little web surfer, yes it would. And make sure you renew your DHCP lease once every 10 minutes!

Possible cablevision response...

[zerofoo]

I've heard rumors from the "bucket-truck guys", that Cablevision is ready to flip the switch on their Docsis 2.0 gear. The cable modem termination systems have been upgraded, and for over a year now, they've been giving out Docsis 2.0 compliant modems.

Docsis 2.0 info here

The new spec is capable of 30Mbps symetric!

-ted

What about BPL?

[Ice Station Zebra]

What about BPL? Everything I read says BPL is going to save us. That it will even make the electrical grid more reliable. BPL? Anybody? Hello? (crikets chirping)

Why not fix existing problems before doing this?

[KC7GR]

I continue to see, in both our mail servers 'reject' logs, ongoing spam attempst and abuse from worm-compromised Verizon DSL systems. Before that, I was seeing spam pretty regularly from Verizon IP ranges.

I kept reporting each piece to Verizon's published abuse address up until about two years ago. Since they never seemed to do anything about it, based on the fact that the spew kept flowing, I simply blocked the 4.0.0.0/8 subnet out of our domain and got on with my life.

Verizon claims to be anti-spam, and they have a decent enough AUP. They've also gone after a number of big-time spammers in legal battles, and won.

However, actions speak louder than anything else. If they continue to permit people to connect to the 'net without at least some basic education about computing security, AND they're unwilling to suspend a customer's connection if their system does contract a worm, then FTTP is going to be nothing more than a bonanza of newly-trojaned high-speed spam spewers.

Verizon should focus more on fixing their existing issues with their lackadaisacal handling of abuse complaints before they start thinking about blowing big bucks on something the spammers will likely find more useful than the end users.

Not in this town

[tepples]

its much chearper for me to pay 30 bucks a month for cable

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, it's $60/mo plus modem rental for cable Internet access if you don't get Comcast cable TV.

Re:this'd be great if their phone service were bet

[lovswr]

Actually that is not just limited to Verizon. Those office techs are nothing but cost to the Verizon's, Sprint/s & MCI's of the world. AT&T has a huge multi-story building in Sacremento. Exactly 2 techs are responsible for it & they have to be dispatched from another location. My own company had a meeting with Level 3 a little while ago. They head Level 3 guy made a little joke that ended with "just send us money". He was, indeed, a little bit serious.

Do you really own copyright in that work?

[tepples]

Large-scale distribution of material to which *I* own the copyright. Maybe I wrote a book, maybe I made a movie or a videogame, or maybe I wrote some usefull piece of software.

Of course, the big copyright companies will do their condemnedest to accuse you of unlawful sampling, that is, of making and distributing a derivative work without permission and beyond fair use. It happened to the late George Harrison.

Network no longer a consideration or limitation in the implementation of video games, this also decreases the need to waste CPU power compressing & reformatting the data for network transmission.

But increases the CPU power used to handle interrupts from the network card.

Name anything that a business might want with high-speed internet service, add the words "home-based" in front of the word "business"

And watch less-enlightened local governments' zoning departments wrap home-based businesses in red tape.

So now it's later. Do you have some 13-20 for us?

dude.

[sakura the mc]

japan has had fiber directly to regular consumer's homes for the longest time. and we are just NOW getting it?? we coulda had this shit LONG ago. oh yeah, las vegas is prolly one of the last places that will get fiber to our homes. looks like ill be stuck with stupid cox communications for the next 5 years. you know thats how long it will take for sprint to fucking lay them shits down here.

So where do I have to move to?

[Anonymous Coward]

(and I'll bet the answer is either going to be Korea or "In Japan")

Re:Article text for the lazy

[ps_inkling]

Google on ESPN and cable TV for more info on how ESPN is the single most expensive channel on your cable bill.

I had better luck searching with "espn cable bundle" and found these articles (for those too busy to STFW):

FCC Requests Comments on a la Carte Cable Subscriptions
At the mercy of cable monopolies
Will Disney deal affect cable rates?
Why your cable bill is soaring

Using current analog cable technology, it would be improbably to offer many choices above basic cable. Most "basic" cable block all channels above a cutoff frequency using a filter at the street connection. To allow selection of various packages in "expanded" cable, there would need to be developed "notch" filters to remove spans of channels, which would not be perfect.

If everyone was converted to digital cable boxes, they could just turn on and off the channels you are allowed to see. Not terribly hard, they already do it for premium channels.

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[LinuxInDallas]

As much as I agree with your points, I would have to say that in regards to #6 we are all better off if everyone eats a little CPU time and compresses their data as opposed to sending all that raw traffic across the network.

Re:Inducement of copyright infringement?

[WuphonsReach]

Really, what other legitimate use does a 30Mbps connection to the home have than the large-scale stealing of copyrighted material?

The trite example is hosting a modern game server. For example, Call of Duty supports up to 64 players (although the max realistic number that I've actually seen is 48).

If each client requires 56Kbps of bandwidth, you'll need 2688Kbps to service 48 clients. Sure, that's only 1/10th of the 30Mbps, but you could easily forecast games that require 128Kbps connections and allow for up to 128 players (which is 16384Kbps).

(Playing on a 40-player server is a lot of fun. It will be interesting to play on 100-player servers in a few years.)

Re:Article text for the lazy

[synaptik]

In the 80's, the cable company (specifically, the commercials on public TV with the 1-800-CABLE-ME number) said, "You won't have to watch commercials, because you pay for the channels." Then they snuck commercials in, I can only guess at the reason why.

Oh yes, I remember those days (sans the phone number, I was pretty young.) There truly were few if any commercials. It rocked.

They have advertising to pay for the channel, but then why does the consumer pay? Or vice versa, why is there advertisement when the consumer is forced to pay, and the rates increase almost every year? Either cable TV is VERY inefficient, or someone has been making far too much money for far too long off of a product and is now trying their damnedest to hold on to a dying business model, via this "a la carte is expensive" crap.

There are both payments and advertisements because consumers put up with it. No one made much of a stink when the commercials first started showing up, so... the obvious happened. But I object to the notion that 'they make too much money'. They make what the market will bear. If most people thought it was highway robbery, they'd drop down to basic cable or broadcast, and start reading books or surfing the internet. If I was single, I wouldn't even have a TV.

And this, "Greed is the lube of the economy," shit is the precise reason this country is going to hell. Anything for a dollar. Disgusting.

Well, it's at least the laxative of the economy then. :)=

SpringNet

[KagatoLNX]

Here in Springfield, Missouri, (pop ~300,000) our local utility monopoly (creatively named City Utilities) provides last-mile fiber for businesses (but not home).

Their web page is a bit behind, but they offer 512kbps for $400/month, 768kbps for $500/month, and 1Mbps for $600/month.

Before you clamor that these rates are really slow for fiber, let me inform you that this is 95th percentile billing. That is, at the end of the month, 95% of your bandwidth usage must be below that limit. The actual connection is full duplex, 100 Mbps (that actually terminates in some pretty serious uplinkage).

I've routinely gotten 6MBps (that's megabytes!) in downloads when rsyncing portage on Gentoo. It makes me . . . happy.

Remember the 100Mbit fiber in Seattle article?

[Arrowmaster]

I hope this doesn't end up like that one did. I did some checking after that article and for less than $50 you got unlimited transfer ammount but you could not run ANY servers under ANY circumstances, or you could have unlimited restrictions on running servers but be limited to 4GB per month and something like $1 per GB over that. (I do not live anywhere near Seattle and have never talked to anybody with this service, I just felt like checking into it) Still some of us wouldn't mind the paying for extra GB used but even with 15Mbit fiber I know a lot of us would probably forget about watching our GBs and run up a bill more than $100 a month just because we want to be able to run servers.

So IMHO for Verisons new service to be sucessful they need to get it rolled out very fast, unlike what they have done with DSL (I can see my Verison CO from my house yet DSL has only been available for a year and at shitty speed/price compared to cable which was also late getting rolled out here(available for about 3 years)), they need to in no way restrict what you can and can't legally do (as in running servers), and they need to have no limit on transfer amounts. Otherwise, I'd most likely stick with my cable or check into the much more expensive DSL plans from other providers if possible.

As far as what other posts have said about the added speed not helping if the rest of the backbone or, as i think it will end up being, other peers not being able to keep up, if on standard cable now you can max out your upload on 1 torrent and get "ok" speeds, dont think 2Mbit is going to help your speeds that much unless you upload to every single client other client on that torrent because if you give 2MBit upload to 1 client they're going to get it damn fast but they'll only beable to give you 256-512KBit. This service will defently expand the potential for peer(you)-to-multiple-peer(everybody else) and mulitple-server-to-client(you). If anybody ever does get a 30Mbit download on this service before it becomes mainstream I will be shocked since with 3Mbit I usually get 20KB/s from most free game files(updates/patches) download sites and ocasionaly 350KB/s from major company sites.

I have 100MB now

[Anonymous Coward]

But I live in Tokyo, Japan. IP Voice, 100 TV ch, and 100MB internet. Max I've used is 80MB when Video conf with a friend (also in Tokyo) and using the phone.

All this for ¥3,500/mnth (circa $30)

Limited areas

[The Cisco Kid]

And of course they wont be competing with SBC, or PacBell, etc.. The service will only be available where Verizon is the incumbent telephone exchange. (ILEC)

Of course, it is interesting they are introducing it in Texas - where SBC has most of the market, geographically. But the only way to switch from SBC to Verizon would be to move, so its not like they really could 'lure SBC customers' away. If there ever really did this (provide this service, or any landline based service, other than long distance, in an SBC territory) I'll eat my hat - with or without ketchup, your preference. Id be so happy to finally set *ONE* of the major baby-bell owning telecom players actually throw down the gauntlet of competition in another providers service area that I wouldnt notice the sweaty-brim taste.

Regardless of what the critics say...

[crashnbur]

...now might be a good time to invest in Verizon stock.

FTTP

[zarniwhoop]

Fiber-to-the-Porch - I'm sure they wont lay fiber throughout my house! ( and yes, its fiber and throughout )

1 Gig cap.

[Civil_Disobedient]

The good news: you can d/l at a blazing 20 megs/sec.

The bad news: at that rate, you will be exceeding your alloted bandwidth for the month in 25 seconds.

Please deposit $0.50 for additional bandwidth.

I can't wait...

[cagem0nkey]

...to get it here in DFW! And I was all ready to pack my bags and move to Keller until I finished the article. Does anyone else consider ISP options in their decisions to move/where to move to?

Interesting bandwidth point...

[Daniel Ellard]

300 Mbps is roughly the peak speed that a garden-variety PCI bus peripheral can manage (many can go somewhat faster, but essentially if you've got something that can pump 300 Mbps to PC, you're running pretty close to its useful capacity. (I think we did all this math last week as part of the slashdot story in 10Gb ethernet...) Coincidence, or shrewd marketing?

I will see your 30mb/s and raise you 30 mb/s

[bcaulf]

You want to know how p2p is going to use up a 30mb/s pipe? HDTV over bittorrent, that's how. Up to 15 mb/s for one stream of video. You can soak up 30mb/s very easily. And either throw it away when done or put it on a 50 cent DVD-R which you burn in ten minutes. It's not happening today, but it will before this fiber to the home stuff is widespread.