Verizon To Pump $18B Into FiOS

larytet writes, "LightReading reports that Verizon will invest $18B into FTTH. The company says its fiber-based service will become profitable after four years, and expects by then to have 7 million customers using FiOS for Internet access." For perspective, have a look at Bruce Kushnick's book $200 Billion Broadband Scandal. His site has a page detailing phone company promises of fiber since 1993. We have been paying for these undelivered promises for years. By now we should have 86 million homes wired with FTTH at 100 Mbits/sec.

Comments

FiOS more real than many of those broken promises

[EVil Lawyer]

For perspective, have a look at Bruce Kushnick's book $200 Billion Broadband Scandal. His site has a page detailing phone company promises of fiber since 1993. We have been paying for these undelivered promises for years. By now we should have 86 million homes wired with FTTH at 100 Mbits/sec.

Fine, there have been plenty of broken promises from phone companies (and, I believe, cable providers, satellite providers, and others) over the years. 7 million homes also might be a little optimistic. But FiOS is really, exists in plenty of homes already, and is much more real than many of those other technologies were at the times the promises were made.

I'm in New York and have FiOS. It's a very nice service. Happily, in New York, the slowest speed tier is 10 down / 2 up, and it's quite affordable compared to cable modem service. I'm looking forward to the FiOS TV service, and the day I'll be completely rid of Time Warner (not that Verizon itself is such a wonderful company).

Believe it when you see it

[qwertphobia]

I'll believe it when I see it. I have Verizon phone service, and I live in a well-populated area, but I cannot get DSL yet. It turns out that some of my local loop is running over copper, and the rest is running over fiber. I cannot get DSL because of the fiber but I also cannot get FIOS because of the copper. So I''ve been waiting, but I might just have to bite the bullet and get Comcast...

I'll take two.

[oc255]

I've been hitting the submit button on the "Can I get FiOS?" site in Northern Virginia since I heard about it in 2004. So far, all I've gotten is a web redirect to their DSL offerings.

Speaking of DSL, I talked to Speakeasy (my dsl provider) and asked them if they'd ever be able to offer their open hosting policies over FiOS. Speakeasy said no because FiOS is regulated differently than your POTS lines. So this really put a damper on things because I won't get port 80 etc over blazing optics. Unless they strike a deal (unlikely?) or an act of congress happens (lobbying?). I'd love to know exactly why fiber is treated differently.

Re:I'll take two.

[curlynoodle]

FiOS is an "Information Service", where as POTS is still a "Telecommunication Service". I think this is the distinction.

The difference is it's already here

[cmorriss]

Yes, lots of other phone companies have made promises about bringing FTTH utopia, however the difference is that Verizon is already doing it. They've been rolling it out in several places around the northeast for a while now.

Here's a blog with lots of details on how the installation is done: http://www.bricklin.com/fiosinstall.htm.

Re:Better late than never?

[ZachPruckowski]

That's not the point. The point is that at my house (or my parents' house, since I'm at college), we have dial-up, because there's no other option. It's not even 56k broadband, the max speed is 36.6k, and then there's all of AOL's overhead. Everyone should have broadband by now, even if it's only 256k

Re:Better late than never?

[saleenS281]

... verizon isn't delivering ANYTHING close to their original promise. Uncapped, unadulterated 100mbit service is nothing like the port blocked, don't upload too much in a month POS they're currently providing. Sure, it's leaps and bounds above DSL... but that should not get them off the hook.

About time... glad I got it.

[strredwolf]

Yep, they're slowly rolling it out, replacing the old copper cable. Plus, they're offering such a sweet deal with Internet and TV over the fiber: $35 for 5mbit up/2mbit down (I sometimes hit 6mbit down, strangely enough). $52 for basic 180 channel digital TV (only 18 channels analog, so you need a set top box or DVR), a STB in one room, a two-tuner DVR in another.

Public privatization

[Rinisari]

Dear lazyweb,

What say you to publically owned, but privately serviced network infrastructure? For example, a city, town, or borough pays to have its own network system (cable, dsl, ftth, whatever) installed, and then has an outside company (Adelphia, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) provide the bandwidth and support. The city retains control of the lines, so in the event the denizens of the city are unhappy with the provider company, they could vote to terminate (or simply not renew) the contract with the company and seek other bids for service.

Re:Public privatization

[Teflik]

Man, that's awesome. I've had a similar idea as to how telecommunications ought to work.

I think that how it should work is this:

• The city owns all of the dark fiber (just like they own all of those empty streets with no cars on them).
• A property owner will have a handful of fiber lines coming onto their plot of land. Some of those fiber lines go off to one wiring closet somewhere in some part of town, and some go off to another wiring closet somewhere else (ie, physical redundancy).
• The property owner has visitation rights to the other end of their little strip of fiber-optic cable. Ordinarily, the property owner will sign these rights over to a third-party, an ISP. So the property owner and the ISP enter into a contract to light up the dark fiber.

In this way, anyone can compete. Also, let's say that a private business had two offices, and they wanted to get a 1 Gbps (or even 10 Gbps) point-to-point connection between the offices, they could probably get it done in a day or two. And they could deal with real human beings (local businesses) to get the job done.

Re:A couple friends have Fios

[kabocox]

The dot-com collapse was a big reason why there was a big delay in getting broadband to metropolitan areas across the USA. It's only within the last three years that landline broadband has been widely available in most larger cities across the USA. Most AT&T customers now have at least access to DSL broadband, and the cable companies have made broadband available to almost everyone nowadays.

Are you kidding me? Are you freaking kidding me? Those are communications companies and not dot-bomb companies. If anything we should have had a faster rollout of telecommunications equipment because the labor and supplies would have been a bit cheaper without the dot-com folks around. I hated the dot-com era and allowing the telecomms to use the dot-com collapse as an excuse for something that they should have had rolled out before the dot-com era really started is a huge cop out. In some respects you can blame the dot-com collapse on the telecoms for not having the nation wired up with fiber at 100 Mbits/sec up and down in the mid 90s! The dot-com era was from the mid to late 90s. The telecoms should have been finishing up wiring the country with fiber before the dot-com era really picked up!

Re:Better late than never?

[plague3106]

Well, I don't consider 256k broadband by any stretch.

I do think broadband should be available everywhere as well. I guess my point was that we should have never waited for the telcos to do this; we should have gotten municipalities to do it for us a while ago.

Snail pace deployment

[Nonillion]

By the time Verizon gets FTTH to my rural home I'll either be too old to care or dead. It's been what, more than six (6) years now; what happened to the $200 billion? Out in my area there is NO xDSL, NO Cable Internet, NO Clearwire only dial up and over priced satellite Internet service. The only way I'm connecting now is with my Verizon wireless account, a whopping 16k/bit sync.

Since my move, I haven't had any broadband service for over two (2) years. I've more or less lost all interest in computers, my Sun boxes sit idle with no Internet connection. All the time I have been mucking around with Linux have been confined to my IBM A31p laptop, and what ever connection I can get at Starbucks, work or open access point.