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?

[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?

[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... ;)

Bandwidth / byte charges

[suckfish]

What terms & conditions?

Is this flat rate, or are there extra costs?

Are you allowed to run servers at home?

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.

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.

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.

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: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