Verizon at Home

[#1]

If you’re a broadband customer – and most of us are – we live in exciting times.  We’re using more bandwidth-hungry apps like HD video streaming, and providers are pushing more speed through their networks to meet our demands.

Whether you’re a Verizon customer or not, your provider may be offering you higher broadband speeds than it did a year or two ago. Cable has upped the ante with DOCSIS 3.0, particularly in areas where they’re seeing competition, and the Fiber to the Home Council reports that smaller wireline carriers are following Verizon’s lead and building all-fiber networks.

But what happens next? Some experts say bandwidth demands are growing tenfold every six years. Some say the rate of change is even greater. Will your provider be able to offer ultra-fast speeds when you’re ready for them?

Earlier this month, Verizon demonstrated once again that we’re ready for the future when our network engineers accomplished a world’s first – a field trial of an XG-PON2 system that produced bandwidth of 10 Gbps (gigabits per second) both downstream and upstream. The closest Verizon had come before was with XG-PON1 that produced speeds of 10 Gbps downstream, but only 2.5 Gbps upstream.

You can watch a video about the world’s first field trial of an optical network technology capable of delivering a 10 Gbps (gigabits per second) broadband connection here.

We had initially achieved such speeds in laboratory settings at our Verizon lab in Waltham, Mass., but this field trial of the system developed by Alcatel-Lucent – the same company that provides a GPON system used by Verizon – was accomplished over an existing Taunton, Mass., business customer’s FiOS connection.  And it was done without impacting the customer’s FiOS Internet and FiOS TV services, which were being carried simultaneously over the same fiber connection.

To put this achievement in perspective, consider that relative to cable operators using DOSCIS 3.0, the speeds were over 60 times faster than their maximum and over 20,000 times faster than their typical customer would experience.

Don’t expect to see TV ads tonight for a new 10 gigabit FiOS Internet service in your neighborhood. The market for speed just hasn’t evolved to that level yet.  But, it does give us an idea of what can be achieved with the new technology.  It also backs up what we’ve been saying for years now – the FiOS platform is future-proof.  It tells the market, we have the fiber network in place to provide lightening-fast speeds for the bandwidth-hungry applications coming down the road – real-time sharing of sophisticated medical images, remote backup and sharing of business files, video hosting, remote computing and other cloud-based services.

In our test, a 2.3 gigabyte movie file took an average of just four seconds to download or upload and save to a computer.  A 6.9 gigabyte medical image was transferred in 11 seconds.

For Verizon, the successful trial means we can accommodate this new technology over the existing fiber connections in our FiOS network with the appropriate equipment positioned on either end of that fiber.  For our customers, it means the future is now, and they are connected to a network that will live up to their expectations.

[#2]

Time will tell ... For now, Verizon's leap to 10 Gbps is about market positioning and bragging rights---edit request by dslr595148

[#3]

How affordable will this be?

Can Verizon's network even handle 20 10 Gbps customers at the moment?---edit request by dslr595148