Slashdot Mirror
Verizon: FiOS Access For Other ISPs in the Works
Ant writes "According to Broadband Reports' story, 'Verizon has confirmed the claim made by a DSLExtreme representative here last week that the company has plans to offer other ISPs access to its new fiber-to-the-premises network.' A Verizon spokeswoman is quoted as saying, 'A couple of deals have already been signed and more are in the works.'"
How often do you think that 100 meg (bit, probably) connection is going to be maxed out? Likely never.
Hahahaha. Verizon isn't planning on just serving up high-speed Internet with their Fiber-to-the-whatever rollouts.
They're also planning on things like television and video-on-demand. At 4-6 Mbps (IIRC) per channel, you'll use up that network capacity very quickly. (I won't go into the details of how you multicast that much data to the set-top boxes.)
I saw a presentation recently on passive optical networks, which IIRC is what Verizon is using for their rollout (or it might be another RBOC, I can't quite remember at the moment, and my notes from the presentatio aren't handy). For a gigabit PON, you've got one gigabit per second available, total, for all subscribers connected to that passive network (anywhere from 2 to 64, depending on the number of optical splitters installed). In addition, you have very limited upstream bandwidth.
I'd much rather see Verizon and the other RBOCs deliver Gig-E straight to my home using active optical networks--Fiber to the home, not fiber to the premises or fiber to the curb. Something like what Provo, UT, is doing with their iProvo project http://www.iprovo.net/. I saw a presentation from World Wide Packets (the equipment vendor) on that a couple weeks ago, and it's very impressive. Almost makes me want to move to Provo.