back to article Verizon demos 1Gbps over existing fiber network

Verizon has conducted a demo in which it pumped nearly a gigabit per second to a remote customer over its existing fiber infrastructure. "This trial demonstrated that the current architecture has sufficient headroom to allow for a progressive increase in capacity as needed by our residential and business customers on our …

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  1. Lou Gosselin

    Only wish they were available.

    Verizon cover about half of long island.

    Everyone I know who's made the upgrade to residential fiber has been impressed. However our area is still under the cablevision monopoly.

  2. JB

    Peak time

    And during the peak it's about 5Mbps!

    I live in a working class town in California, and would love to take out fiber-optic cable, but being where I am I doubt whether there's much of a market. Our local cable provider, Wave, is the usual rubbish, 18Mbps/1Mbps with a ridiculous 25Gb per month cap. Can't be bothered to do the mahs, but I'd imaging that would be eaten up in seconds at 1Gbps!

    Would be interesting to see how this behaves in the real world with millions of users weighing it down.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This makes me wonder if ...

    Bell Canada (BCE) isn't preparing to sell Bell Aliant to Verizon. We've been rolling out that same technology. People that get FTTH/FTTP love it, but as stated above the backhaul bandwidth will always be the issue.

    I wonder about a sale as BCE is playing hardball negotiating this contract. Make sme think they want to show the Union as being weak which of course makes it a more attractive purchase. These big corporations are going to ruin the regional economy.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    Too little too late

    Verizon already sold most of their land lines (including FiOS in many states) to Frontier. Why are they announcing this now?

  5. Version 1.0 Silver badge

    Meanwhile, out in the boonies

    In rural Mississippi when the mother-in-law lives gets about 14kbs on average - less if it's raining.

  6. Lance 3

    What

    How was it smart of them to spend 23 billion and they currently don't offer anything that others don't. AT&T has FTTP as well, they are just not replacing the copper with fiber yet in existing areas. FiOS is also not cheap for the subscriber nor Verizon; last I heard, it costs $700 to $800 to hook a customer up. The ROI is WAY out there. As others have noted, they are selling some of the properties to Fairpoint and Frontier. They also announced that any FiOS currently taking place will be the last. So if it is so great, why are they selling properties and why are they not rolling it out anyplace new? AT&T is continuing their Uverse roll-out. Oh, Verizon never rolled out any fiber in Boston and has no plans to do so.

  7. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    Verizon's plans

    "AT&T has FTTP as well, they are just not replacing the copper with fiber yet in existing areas."

    No they don't have FTTP -- as you say in this very sentence. FTTP is fiber to the premises, i.e. all the way to the end user. AT&T has FTTN -- fiber to the node.

    "The ROI is WAY out there."

    Yes it is. Verizon is like that both with wireless and wireline though -- they invest a lot in their infrastructure, spending a lot up front, but it seems to work out for them in the long term. I should note, in the Bell System days, they planned on AT LEAST a 20 year service life for anything they bothered to install. I think Verizon just still plans this way -- they have a lot of very old copper, in varies states of decay. So, instead of running fiber to the node, then having to replace the copper sometime later, they are just doing it all up front. I have read they figure it costs now but will save in the future.

    Verizon Wireless has done the same sort of thing -- they rolled out EVDO almost network-wide (versus AT&T having maybe 20% 3G coverage), and they are planning to roll out LTE network-wide within the next 4 or 5 years. People thought they were made to roll EVDO out as agressively as they did, but it paid off.

    One gamble they are also taking is that people's appetites for bandwidth will continue to increase. Since fiber to the node uses DSL for the last distance, the maximum it will ever achieve is 100mbps (VDSL2, with a short phone line). If that's enough to cover people's future usage, then fiber to the home is a waste. If not, AT&T, Qwest, etc. will have to roll out fiber to the home down the road anyway.

    Are they right? I don't know. Qwest ran fiber to the node here, and (although I don't have Qwest internet) I'm happy for it -- I went from having no DSL whatsoever available, to being able to get 20mbps if I want.

    " As others have noted, they are selling some of the properties to Fairpoint and Frontier."

    Yep. They decided those areas will NEVER pay for themselves, so they sold them off.

    "They also announced that any FiOS currently taking place will be the last."

    That's a shame.

    "So if it is so great, why are they selling properties and why are they not rolling it out anyplace new?"

    Well, probably ROI. They rolled it out where they will get their money back, and didn't where they won't. Hate to say it but it's true.

  8. AndrueC Silver badge
    Thumb Up

    Clever but probably not so useful

    So they can pipe nearly 1Gb/s to a single customer at the end of a contended service? Well - good for them, I suppose. OTOH that's basically just making sure it all does what it's supposed to. Of more interest - what's the real world situation like when several dozen people all ask for 1Gb/s at the same time through the same fibre?

    On the plus side I doubt there's many places outside of Verizon's network that can supply data at that rate so it's probably academic at the moment :)

  9. -tim
    WTF?

    Over-subscription nightmare?

    Running a gig over a shared medium with a 2.4 gbps capacity means your service will get worse from the day its installed. That assumes the cable TV stuff isn't in the way too.

  10. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    Just a small correction

    >Brian Whitton, executive director of Verizon's technology group, put a marketing spin on the results. "This kind of bandwidth capacity will provide Verizon the ability to start meeting FiOS customers' needs by offering more bandwidth to support services such as email, Usenet, multiplayer texting and limited browsing in privileged areas," he said.<

    There, reads better like that.

  11. Tom 13

    FIOS is working out well for me, and Verizon is making money from it.

    We pay around $160/month for the triple play, have been for over two years now when we finally killed our Comcast cable connection. We've been on the Internet service for over four. No problems with up down speeds and we are in a major metropolitan area where contention ought to be an issue. Occasionally we get some strangeness on the tv feed, but it usually clears fairly quickly. Internet is rock solid, except for Zynga games on Facebook, which I'm reasonably sure is servers at the Zynga farm. Oh, and occasional issues with Google Adwords refers from some of the sites I visit (AdWords download visible for 30 seconds, then everything else magically appears in under 5).

  12. steward
    FAIL

    The last mile eludes Verizon

    Verizon can't even reach all POTS subscribers with FIOS in the most densely populated US State.with FIOS. (That's NJ, folks, home of the first area code for DDD: 201.)

    And to add insult to injury, they send ads about FIOS every two months to areas where it's not available.

  13. Tim Keck

    @steward

    Area codes were assigned to minimize the total number of 'clicks' required to dial across the expected user calling space. The 'lowest' A/C is 211 (Brooklyn) since 0 take 10 clicks. So no points to NJ for 'first' See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbering_plan

    1. steward
      Badgers

      If you read El Reg on a regular basis at all...

      you know about the reliability of Wikipedia: zero.

      Brooklyn, like the rest of New York City, was 212 for many years. It was only after the introduction of +1 dialing that X11 codes were even used for area codes.

      415 was introduced at the same time as 201, to make a coast-to-coast DDD call possible.

      It's always good to consult a primary source, such as http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/51trans.html , instead of a useless source, like Wikipedia.

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