Verizon Offers 20/20 Symmetrical FiOS Service

BlueMerle writes with news that Verizon is offering 20 Mbps symmetrical service for current FiOS customers in NY, CT, and NJ. It will cost $65 a month. Cable companies aren't in a position to match this capability.

Decisions, decisions....

[Bongo Bill]

On the one hand, finally, a competitive level of Internet service.

On the other hand, Verizon.

Well, it's a non-issue for me, since I'm not in any of those states, but it'll give me time to think about it between now and when (if) they start offering it in my area.

No love for Socal?

[sqrt(2)]

I pay almost that much already for Charter high speed cable that's a fraction of those speeds. My upstream is half a meg. With 20/20 I could actually keep my BT ratios positive. I might need to buy some more HDDs though...

I doubt charter will ever improve in my area until they have some real competitors. Right now they're the only game in town if you want the fastest connection.

Re:One word:

[marcello_dl]

I was thinking more like: one server in the office, a colocated or virtual small backup server for emergency, LAMP or equivalent (i prefer postgres and rails) and be done with the google model of "all your data are belong to us".

Still you're not free, until you stop depending on one ISP alone.

Verizon FIOS customers in other parts of country

[linuxguy]

I am a Verizon FIOS customer of their 5/5 service in Portland,Oregon and pay $209/month for it. I wouldn't mind being able to get the 20/20 service in my area. When is Verizon going to show us some love? Verizon reps if you are reading this, the FIOS customer base in the rest of the country is really feeling unloved right now.

The NY/NJ/CT customers already had the higher 10/10 service available and you went and upped them to 20/20. While the rest of the country is stuck with pokey (relatively speaking) 5/5.

Re:No love for Socal?

[speaker of the truth]

Why else would a home user need 20/20 if they aren't uploading torrents? Surely Verizon realizes this, right?

Re:No love for Socal?

[sqrt(2)]

I guess with all the problems with charter, at least they don't do any of that. I max out my connection (upstream at least) nearly 24/7 all month (Google says that's about 148GB) and have never been charged more or gotten so much as a warning. If I ever did get a connection with a company that limits it, I'd be sure to find out exactly how much I can safely use and get as close to that as possible every month.

Sigh...

[Cyno01]

Just paid my monthly $170 yesterday for 3/1.5meg internet, an HD DVR, 16 HD channels and digital cable with everything but showtime. Its expensive because i live in the boonies sort of, but its also worth it because theres nothing to do out here.

Re:Heh

[dascritch]

Yeah... no way to saturate my 100Mb/100Mb FiOS here in Toulouse. (offered by Orange, price is 45E monthly)

I live in Sunnyvale, the heart of Silicon Valley

[MichaelCrawford]

You'd think I could get some kind of fiber service, but no, and when I googled for it I found this huge long thread on Usenet that was all about how Silicon Valley doesn't have good Internet because the phone company won't invest in upgrading their infrastructure.

We have Comcast cable, but I didn't opt for a cable modem because I found Comcast in a list of ISPs that block BitTorrent [azureuswiki.com].

Not that I was looking for warez: no, I operate a legal BitTorrent tracker and dedicated seed to offer downloads of my own music (see sig). I need free access to BitTorrent just to monitor them, as sometimes the BitTorrent seed software (btdownloadmany.py) falls over.

Just my luck that I live beyond the range for DSL. After a lot of research I came across Stephouse [stephouse.com], which offers something called "ISDL", or DSL over ISDN, which can go somewhat farther than regular DSL.

It works, but I pay $99 a month for 144kbps. At least I'm able to monitor my torrents, but I'm not able to watch videos on Youtube.

I'm very happy with Stephouse as a provider though, they have a remarkably permissive TOS, and their support people have been great.

What's in a name?

[doyoulikeworms]

I really wonder if Verizon could offer, say, 25/25 for the same price, but chose 20/20 because it's a "better" name.

I mean, what are the chances that the cost effectiveness sweet spot just so happens to be 20mbps up and 20mbps down?

Set your own ratio?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I would certainly be nice for those of us stuck with cable to be able to adjust or choose our own upload / download ratio. Perhaps with a simple web interface on the cable company support site, or even dynamically do it for us.

Off-site...

[evilviper]

This is extremely impressive, and may well be a game-changer...

When Verizon finally rolls-out FIOS here (they've said it's coming "soon" for a couple years), I'll probably sign-up for TWO connections... One for my home, and the other for a family member (within driving distance) or perhaps a friend. In exchange for free ultra-high-speed internet access, all they have to do is leave my back-up server running. rsync will finish pretty damn fast over a 20Mbps connection...

This really opens the possibility of a lot of online file-hosting services going out of business... It's no longer special that they have high-speed upstream, so why pay so much for an over-priced, terribly-limited, managed file hosting service?

Now if somebody could just convince Verizon to enable multicast on all their routers...

If this is indeed true...

[jskline]

Then you can expect the bot-herders will be swarming up heavily to find machines to own that are on these networks. You can do a much better job of taking down Yahoo and I forget who else is on the shit-list of some of these idiots with this kind of uplink speed! It's like having your bots all co-located at an ISP on a DS3 or bonded T1's ready to do your bidding...

Re:Heh

[cheaphomemadeacid]

Oh nice, oh as long as you don't use it for anything but web and email, max 5GB/month [google.com]

quote from article:
Verizon's user agreement for the BroadbandAccess plan prohibits continuous streaming of audio or video and peer-to-peer file sharing, all of which generate heavy traffic.

and

It also reserves the right to disconnect or slow down traffic for anyone using too much data, but since this spring, the cap has been explicit rather than undisclosed: 5 gigabytes of data per month.

Ummmm... to run a little web server.

[Joce640k]

I could definitely use a little web server for my work - sending files to clients, etc. 20Mbit would do the job nicely.

At the moment I have to upload files to a third party server with my slow upload then send them a link. With my own connection they could get the files directly from me, no "wait while I upload it..." delay.

Re:Decisions, decisions....

[kakofb]

ADSL2+ can deliver the 20mbit downlink component, and with Annex-M up to 2.6mbit upload.
I'm sitting on such a connection right now, here in Sydney. If the U.S. had line sharing legislation you could too!

Line sharing is a fantastic thing. It allows small ISPs to have their own DSLAMs in exchanges, while using existing copper networks to people's houses. Sure ADSL2+ is not anywhere near as good as FiOS can be, but it is far more open and competitive. I have the choice of at least 10 ADSL2+ providers on my exchange (Internode, iiNet, Telstra, Primus, NexTep, TPG, Optus plus all the ISPs that resell Optus DSLAM space).

Competition is Great

[Yeef]

I've been using Optimum Online for about five years now and it's always been a pretty bad service up until recently. My connection would drop for fix or six hours at a time with no explanation a few nights a week. I'd call the support line and they'd fix something on their end and get it working again, but then it'd just drop a few hours later. It got to the point where it wasn't worth all the time spent on hold calling them every time it happened so I just began to work around it. On top of that my upload speeds were capped at about 17 kB/s which was a lot less than other people with the same plan as me were getting. Unfortunately, it was the only broadband service available to me so it was either learn to deal with the annoyances or switch back to dial-up.

Then about two years ago Verizon started rolling out their fios plans around here. A couple of my friends got it and loved it. It was a lot faster than cable and about 10 dollars cheaper to boot (or the same price for an even FASTER plan). So of course, I wanted to switch myself. So I looked at their site for details and started to get a little worried when I saw that they needed to install fiber in the ground. I knew it'd be a problem because I live in an apartment building, but their site claimed my address was eligible, so I figure it can't hurt to schedule an install. Of course the day the installer comes he tells me that I'm not eligible which was no big surprise.

But something great happened. I don't know if it was a coincidence or if Optimum had somehow found out that I tried to switch, but a few days later I noticed a huge increase in my speeds. Ever since then I've been getting down speeds in the range of 12~13 MBps or so and up speeds at about 2~3 MBps. My connection very rarely ever drops and when it does it's only for a few seconds.

If that's the effect that a single competitor has I can't help but wonder what sort of service we'd be seeing if we all had half a dozen or more broadband choices.

Re:20 Mbps

[Shakrai]

Additional costs : 20$ / Kb (including 10% RIAA preventive fee)

I hate them for reasons beyond this post, but Verizon hasn't shown inclination towards helping RIAA out. They actively fought them back in the day on disclosing one of their customers and you don't see Verizon's name in the news trying to figure out a way to leverage their backbone product into stopping piracy for RIAA.

I'm still not sure if I would do business with them, as I currently have the option and decided not to (could get their DSL at 1.5/384), but fear of them helping the content providers would not currently be a reason for not doing business with them, IMHO. Just good old-fashioned fear of being screwed if I ever needed to leave, cuz I'm sure the service doubtless has a contract, like everything else they do......

(Ironic how Time Warner can spend a few hours here, installing indoor wiring, and not require an install fee or a long term contract, but Verizon wants one just for getting DSL when they don't even have to do anything beyond turn it on)

Re:Decisions, decisions....

[pixr99]

Such a concept exists here in the US as well. It isn't available to all ISPs but it is open to CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers). These are the independent phone companies. They do exactly what you've mentioned. They put DSLAMs in the central offices. They have access to the incumbents' services, dry copper and, in some places, unbundled network elements (dark fiber).

ADSL2+ may already exist in the US but we've got a terrible combination of century old copper and *long* distances from COs to rural customers.

Re:Heh

[Rolgar]

Installing Debian from the MIT or Indiana mirrors, I peak about 20Mbps on my Cable line, and can get sustained of about 15Mbps. There are servers out there that can provide bandwidth. Also, when I hit my Morning Coffee button in Firefox, my 30 pages load in about 30 seconds. There are ways to benefit from higher caps.

Wow! This'll make for great botnets!

[Wdomburg]

Not that I don't appreciate the potential, but as a mail service provider I have to cringe at the prospect of infected machines with fat upstream pipes.

Re:Decisions, decisions....

[Gr8Apes]

Personally, I couldn't care diddly for rural customers. There's no reason that urban customers have to suffer a LCD environment. Heck, I live less than 3 miles from a center of telecommunications in the US (perhaps the center) and until recently I couldn't get "broadband" (as defined as greater than at least 1Mbps in both directions) from anyone until just a couple of months ago when AT&T finally lit their fiber.

As for that service, it's far better than the cable service I was using, the upload speed side alone makes it worth spending less... :) The download speed side, on the package I decided to take, is about half, but I looked at my usage patterns and concluded that I rarely exceeded this level of download, and therefore didn't need to poney up the extra 25% for doubling download speeds.

While talking to the installers, they claimed that within a few months, they'll be going to a new backbone, and speeds should be raised significantly across the board. We'll wait and see on that one. Right now I'm enjoying greater upload speeds at half the cost of cable. That works for me.

Re:Decisions, decisions....

[COMON$]

Try having a company routinely have "billing errors" of $10-$20 a month, you have to correct them and watch your bills like a hawk. Makes me wonder how many people Alltel has screwed over that simply pay their bills every month. Or a company that re-routes your calls in what appears to be circles you just get an infinite clicking sound until you redial. Or voice mail that never picks up, or any of a billion technical issues. Not to mention all of 3 brick style phones to choose from until the contracts open up. But hey at least I have customer support 24-7.

Maybe this is me being a grass is greener guy but Verizon, while having crappy customer support seems to be be on the cutting edge of mobile tech, and their network is more reliable than most from what I hear. Perhaps the powers that be decided to redirect funds to tech development rather than band aids to handle the poor support you get otherwise. But take this all with a grain of salt since I don't have any first hand experience with verison.

Re:Verizon FIOS customers in other parts of countr

[sgarringer]

Yes, but most people are lazy. I have triple play deal, internet, cable and phone each for $30 a month ($90 total). When my first year is up, it goes to $150 total. Second year, it jumps to almost $210 total. Was very hard to get those numbers from the cable company. You can bet that I won't be paying the $49.95/mo they want for phone service that 2nd year or the $69.95 they want for digital cable that 3rd year. FTA TV and some of the cheaper VoIP services sound pretty sweet.