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Verizon: FiOS Access For Other ISPs in the Works

Posted by timothy on from the fiber-to-the-premises-win-the-argument dept.

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.'"

8 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Nice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's always nice to see open networks. They do come at a price, but it's pretty fair to build a business around. I have seen those Verizon Guys in front of my house hooking up the fiber. They told me it will be a couple of months until I can get the net with the fiber, but it's coming. I just hope I can use the upstream to host my web sites. I hate paying for hosts and all that just to have a presence on the web. Unfortunately the residential service my current Cable Modem provider offers doesn't allow any servers being exposed to the public. I mean it's great having an intranet at home, but with all the money I spend they could have at least let me setup a web server and open that up. It's only a personal site so I don't know what the big deal is really. I can see if it was commercial, but man they are rough.

    So when they transfer everyone to digital (10 years or so) then maybe their bandwith will free up. For the future the Verizon solution looks like a good deal they already offer 30mbps down and 5mbps up for a reasonable price.

    1. Re:Nice by CyberDave · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Heck yea! by episodic · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now slashdot will render in a tenth of a second rather than an eighth of a second like it does now! It is indeed a great day.

  3. This is not competition! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This, like DSL shared access, is not competition. For example, we sale DSL in Hell$outh and Verizon territories, and they charge us more for just the raw line than they charge customers for the line plus Internet access. We have to charge our customers twice as much as Verizon does just to break even. If it wasn't for our much better customer support, we would have been out of business a long time ago.

    To explain this a different way. For DSL, BellSouth charges end-users $25 for a slow connection. BellSouth charges us $30 for the same speed connection plus we pay about $20,000 per month in overhead for our ATM connection to those customers plus we pay about $15k per month for Internet bandwidth to Sprint. As you can see, BellSouth is abusing their monopoly position. They aren't selling to us just to be nice, and there is no competition.

  4. Re:FiOS by LokieLizzy · · Score: 5, Funny
    But the promise of 15mbps, which is nearly 4x what I get now; and the major thing, 2mbps up, is really, really enticing.

    Why would you need 2mbps up, and 15mbps down? You wouldn't be sharing copywrighted music, would you?

    Signed,

    Your friendly neighborhood

    RIAA Agent.

    --
    My digital rights don't need management.
  5. Re:FiOS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am an engineer for Verizon designing part of this large fiber network. They are putting it up in places people can afford it and places where population density permits. It costs a whole lot of money to put this stuff up. It also goes very slow as the splicing of fiber optic cables is very time consuming and has to be perfect or the loss in the cable will render the cable useless. You will be able to get HDTV, phone, and a retardedly fast internet connection all on one bill. Fairly cheap I think. You can actually get a faster upload then 2mbps I think, but I am not totally sure. Either way you get a T-1 for way less than the business cost.

  6. Wait a minute?! by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Funny

    Verizon would suck as an ISP, as would AOL a network provider.

    Are you implying by that statement that AOL does not suck as an ISP?

  7. Re:FiOS by jrmann1999 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The install is basically an external box that separates the fiber, they drill a hole to the nearest power outlet for the battery backup, and run Cat5 + Cat3 to a single drop anywhere in the house. Then they give you the crappiest D-Link wired router possible.