Verizon Announces FTTP Prices 384
ffejie writes "C|NET News.com is reporting that Verizon has announced its pricing on Fiber-to-the-Premises - it 'will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service', and more if bought on its own. The high speed internet service, dubbed Verizon Fios, brings speeds up to 30 Mbps to the home. FTTP could lead to a sweeping change, especially in the television industry. According to News.com: 'Verizon is considered the furthest along with its fiber plans. It reiterated on Monday its goal of reaching 1 million homes and offices by the end of the year...' It looks as if FTTP is coming to the masses."
Can the backbones handle it? (Score:5, Interesting)
A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35 a month if purchased along with Verizon's local and long-distance telephone service. The service will cost $40 if purchased alone. A connection of up to 15mbps is available for $45 a month if purchased as part of the same telephone service bundle, or $50 alone. The company did not reveal pricing for the 30mbps plans.
That is subsantially less than the $210 I currently pay for my 3Mbps/1Mbps small business connection. I wonder how many of these will roll out as people like me jump to them before the major internet infrastructure starts to suffer? I mean, think of it: end point capacity could literally be upgraded by a factor of 10 in some areas. Will the backbones and their major tributaries be able to handle it?
Either way, I am looking forward to it.
Josh.
Bandwidth / byte charges (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this flat rate, or are there extra costs?
Are you allowed to run servers at home?
Monthly Bandwidth Limit (Score:5, Interesting)
going to smoke cable (Score:5, Interesting)
How much for a static IP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Too Bad Verizon is Evil (Score:5, Interesting)
Verizon already restricts people using Verison DSL. SMTP traffic is filtered unless it goes through their server and if it does go through their server, you can only use a verison.net email address.
Plus Verizon is the local telephone monopoly in this area, I don't want to voluntarially give additionnal business to any monopoly. They've sucessfully challanged the law which requires them to share their wires with competitors.
So, while FTTH is an excellent idea, bundling it with a lot of services I don;t need isn't.
We need a regulated monopoly to bring IP to the home and then allow companies to compete in providing services over that wire. The regulated monopoly *must not* be allowed to compete in ancillary services.
Why does stuff go to middle of Noplace first? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't make more sense to launch it in MA where nearly the entire Easteren half of the state is sreaming for this kind of thing... or in the Valley In CA...
Tech savay places that could really take advanage of things like this...
Bandwidth is unnecessary for 1 way connections (Score:3, Interesting)
Fine Print.. (Score:3, Interesting)
A 2mbps to 5mbps Fios connection will cost $35
towards the end of the article. It's not exactly $1 per mbps.
Still, exciting.. More competition is good. Lets hope the upstream capabilites are very good as well.
Re:Article text for the lazy (Score:3, Interesting)
Pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
I'll never see broadband out in East Bumble. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Article text for the lazy (Score:2, Interesting)
Did I miss something? (Score:3, Interesting)
I read the article, and don't remember seeing anything that implied to difference between upload and download speeds.
Is there any reason to believe that this isn't a plain old 30Mbps pipe? (2/3rds of a DS3?)
Further, it there any reason to believe that this will be anything other than FastEthernet over fiber, with some rate limiting?
Not any time soon... (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get too excited. It's only coming to one town in Texas, then California, then Florida- and "2005" was in there somewhere- and rarely do those dates, especially when given that vaguely- mean anything. It most likely won't hit most major population centers until several years later, if at all; fiber gear is even more expensive than DSL gear, and with the US's low population density, even less likely to be profitable.
This is what I like to call a Trophy Rollout. DSL was the same way for me; I live about 25 minutes west of Boston, next to one of the richest communities in the state(thanks to all the execs, doctors, lawyers etc from Boston living there), but because AT&T Cable is in town, Verizon didn't want to compete against them, or they had a gentleman's agreement- but our CO has been wired for at least 4 years for DSL. We also don't have a choice in cable companies- it's cable, or satellite.
Within the last year or two, Verizon is finally offering service- but ONE plan, and no other ISPs save Verizon are offering service. 1.2Mbps/128kBit. Yes, 128kBit upload. Ie, useless for "sharing photos" or "sending files to work" etc. All this costs MORE than 3Mbit/384kBit offered by AT&T, which Verizon makes up for by marketing as "a line you don't share with all your neighbors." Sorry, but AT&T actually has plenty of capacity now, and I routinely get things like OS X software updates -at- 3Mbit/sec, on the dot(a friend and I theorize they set the cap a teensy bit over 3Mbit to account for protocol overhead). Yay, wonderful- except AT&T is draconian with their acceptable use policy, and can't keep their mail servers up worth a damn.
If I lived ONE town over, Framingham, for example- I could have my choice among about 5 different major providers/subproviders, including Speakeasy, Covad, Megapath, and a couple of Worcester based ISPs..and about 10 different residential and business rates.
How sad is it that I live right next door to the technology center of the east, but I have next to no choice in high speed internet access?
Re:Can the backbones handle it? (Score:5, Interesting)
How do you spell "NO!" ??? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, no, no! No DSL, no ISDN, just forget it. I will be taking my eternal dirt nap before Verizon brings me any fiber.
Re:Not any time soon... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Too Bad Verizon is Evil (Score:4, Interesting)
This is misleading. I have Verizon service (POTS and DSL) in Monroe, WA, and they don't touch my traffic and don't give a fig about what servers I run.
See I have DSL service from Verizon, but they are not my ISP, so I don't have to put up with assanine ToS. I get my internet connectivity from blarg.net [blarg.net]. Verizon just provides the backhaul from the DSLAM to Blarg! And, to their credit, Blarg! doesn't use MTU-mangling PPPoE. Just one long virtual circuit private "electonic highway" onramp for me (well, a dedicated lane on that onramp, if you really want to push the analogy -- work with me here :-)). My "always on" connection is very much always on.
Verizon sucks rotten eggs, as far as serivce is concerned (took 'em forever to acknowledge that, yes, I had an international long distance plan, and no, my calls to Canuckistan were not to be billed at $0.75/minute), but I'm stuck with them as a telco. So, I subscribe to what little I can. In this case, that means just the data pipe from me to my ISP.
There is a bit of a downside, of course, and that is price. But, it is not unreasonable: instead of some $30 a month for neutered dynamic IP access, I pay them closer to $40 a month just for the pipe and another $35 a month or so to Blarg!. Static IP? No problem (well, it costs a bit extra, included in the above price). NATed hosts? No problem. Inbound SMTP? No problem (but don't relay please: the IP address is ours and we like to keep a clean anti-SPAM reputation). Inbound telnet? Hey, it's your security, do what you want. Sure. Inbound HTTP? It's your box you're Slashdotting, not ours.
Now, of course, there are a few things I shouldn't do that'd hurt Blarg!, like run a busy site at the end of a DSL link, but those kinds of things would be bad to me too. Still, no one is going to cut me off for opening up port 80 for a day or two of private testing.
So, yeah, sure, sell me a fatter cheaper pipe Verizon. If all you can do with a modest degree of competence is sell pipes, do that.
Re:Did I miss something? (Score:3, Interesting)
What's going on here is that they want to attract more consumer business, not cut into business business. The average consumer is not interested in high uplink rate, because what they are doing is downloading (pr0n?).
This is intended as a consumer product, to get consumer accounts. If it is used on the business side, you can assume because of past practices, that the uplink rate will be reflected in the cost.
Re:FTTP vs. FTTH (Score:3, Interesting)
Deployment in Massachusetts (Score:3, Interesting)
They said they were prepping the street for Verizon to come in and lay fiber. Now I live in North Reading, and this guy claimed that mine is the first town in the state to be getting Fiber to the home. He claimed that they would be offering service in my area before the end of the year.
Needless to say, I'm very excited. With prices like that, I'll definitely switch from Comcast. I like Comcast, but I like bandwidth more, especially upload, since I work remotely and host a few small websites from my home.
Re:Inducement of copyright infringement? (Score:5, Interesting)
1: Large-scale distribution of material to which *I* own the copyright. Maybe I wrote a book, maybe I made a movie or a videogame, or maybe I wrote some usefull piece of software.
2: Large-scale distribution of copyright material with the express permission of the copyright holder(s). (for instance, Linux ISOs)
3: High-Speed distribution of files from my computer at home to other computers around the world (kind of like an external hard drive that I dont have to carry).
4: Downloading something that I just bought (software, in the future perhaps a movie) in seconds instead of minutes/hours.
5: Downloading something free in seconds/minutes instead of hours (Linux ISOs, patches & updates for various software applications)
6: Network no longer a consideration or limitation in the implementation of video games, this also decreases the need to waste CPU power compressing & reformatting the data for network transmission.
7: Set up a media streaming service that allows me to watch any movie or listen to any song that I own from anywhere around the world (authentication required so that its only me)
8: Run permanent servers for all your favorite games all at the same time (one or two per computer, times how ever many computers you have)
9: Infinitely many fascinating new uses for global-scale networks that nobody ever thought of because the amount of data generated was so absurd that it was dismissed as "try again in 2150"
10: Really interesting new types of distributed computing, such as the SETI project, which can have individual machines on the network communicate with each other during processing. It will now be possible to send both to the initiating server and to other clients, large quantities of data generated from whatever the current "work unit" is.
11: Name anything that a business might want with high-speed internet service, add the words "home-based" in front of the word "business"
12: This message would post to slashdot in nanoseconds instead of milliseconds, or something like that.
I need to get back to work, so I will leave this list off here, but if I had to I could go on.
I'm dead serious about this too... It'd be really cool to have my external hard drives with me wherever I go without having to lug 7 pounds of crap with me, just because I have 200 GB of stuff that I might want. Just because people would use the item to commit crimes does not mean that it is a criminal device.
Consider: A crowbar is used for more than just theft.
A gun is used for more than just murder.
A camera/photocopier/scanner/printer/... is used for more than juist making illegal copies of printed materials.
A computer is used for more than copyright infringement.
The internet is used for more than copyright infringement. In fact, it is used for legitimate businesses all the time. (see Amazon.com, or iTunes Music Store, or eBay, or
</rant>
-- Fareq
Just called (Score:3, Interesting)
Property prices (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Just called (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't need the $20 when I asked, but the guys couldn't find any pairs. My Comcast cablemodem has been doing fine for a couple years now, and work pays for it. Is that your Saturn I've seen around town with all the
long distance (Score:3, Interesting)
As to airlines, I don't have to fly really, last time I flew was a long time ago, like 10 years and I (would potentially) boycott them now since 9-11 turned everyone in the nation but the government (the real crooks) into a terrorist. I am not digging on "you are guilty by default" by those bozos, just the thought of it is abhorrent, the airlines and big bro can byte me, I'll drive. I know some people like ya'all and other business folks *must* fly, oh well, guess that's what you will put up with then. I thought by now everyone would be telecommuting anyway, maybe this fiber to the house idea will catch on and a lot more people will do that. I'll certainly get it if it ever shows up. I know my local phone guys told me (a few months ago when I had POTS installed) there's fiber all the way to the nearest switch box, so I asked them when they were going to offer it to the individual homes down the road,because I was interested in broadband, they said "never, no way, unless they are ordered to by the government". And dsl is out, too far away and they have all the twisted pairs maxed out, I don't know the nitty gritty tech details, something about they "share" the lines or something because of the new houses down the street. So I got fiber a bit over two miles away, and my chances of getting any broadband will be wireless or wireless, that's it.
Point is moot anyway,back to the airlines, we are *one* unpredictable wildcard event away from airline travel being too costly for all but the government and ultra rich. It wouldn't take much for oil to get to 100-150$ a barrel, just another random war (probably happen whenever we provoke iran enough for the next war to start) in the mideast or some massive domestic terrorist deal happening. Probably happen late summer or early fall is my best guess at this point.
Thinking about it,just your situation in general,as it applies to everyone who know travels with the airlines a lot for business, it *might* be a good idea to develop a non travel work around for it "now", as a backup solution so you don't have to scramble to create if something weird hits.
Re:Not any time soon... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can the backbones handle it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Um... Yeah... Dark Fiber... That's a bunch of fiber optic lines running along railroads (mostly), that doesn't have equipment on either end. The backbone isn't the problem. If one of the major provider's is low on bandwidth, they can just upgrade the current equipment they've got. (Fiber has so much available capacity, that when you want to upgrade, you normally just replace the sender/receiver, and the repeaters, and you suddenly have more available.) It's cheaper to upgrade the equipment than to lay new lines/
As to the dark lines in place? Backbone isn't the problem. It's the fact that no one can afford more than a single twisted pair to the office/home since laying fiber is so expensive. I've got a friend who works at an office where the building is lit up (which means fiber is run to the building and in use), and each company has 100Mbit ethernet to the fiber equipment, and a guarantee that the company has at least that much bandwidth (per customer) to all of it's peering points.
That's the power available with fiber. Once everyone's got that kind of connection, we'll see a sudden leap, from 256Kbps or 1Mbit up to 15, 30, 50, 100. Look at how far we've stretched copper already, and we're at the extreme end of what it can do. We're only at the beginning of fiber, and once you get it to your home, the service levels will increase much faster than lines do today.
Kinda makes me want to move back to the U.S... (though not if I have to live in Texas... ;)
Cynical point of view (Score:3, Interesting)
In this case, I take the cynical point of view that, for the power user or system administrator (so, most of the reading audience at Slashdot), it'll turn out to be little more than a speed benchmark. I'd rather hear what you're allowed to do with this line rather than just a speed and cost figure.
"Pedestal" perhaps? (Score:3, Interesting)
Granted, "premesis" makes it sound like it's coming right up to your doorstep. I'll bet there's a greasy marketing weasel behind the terminology selection.
Re:30mbps down.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Will Fiber stand the test of time like copper has... copper has been on the go for over 100 years. Copper is now being used over 1000 times it's specification when it was designed (3kHz back then, way over 5MHz for VSDL etc).
To acheive the same result with fiber it would have to run at 622Gbps. Before you laugh, in 100 years we will probably be downloading the latest 'holographic DVD' off suprnova.org which will be 1PB
30mbps.. is this synchronous? (Score:1, Interesting)
great service but what about caps... (Score:2, Interesting)
And the upstream will still be 300kbit.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can the backbones handle it? (Score:3, Interesting)
This will all demand an end to the nonsense of operating systems which can be easily hacked into. Microsoft will replace the Windows underpinnings transparently with something that is standards based (probably BSD variant), but Linux will continue to thrive for those who want to have complete control over what they do with their own hardware.
I think the demands of content owners like the RIAA and MPAA for some sort of DRM and policing of copyright violations will keep this from taking off as you predict as well as give me an incentive to keep a local copy of all my files.
In addition there are the privacy concerns, I don't exactly want John Ashcroft to be doing fishing expeditions against data I choose to store simply becuase he feels like it. At least with data on my own hard drives I have a pretty good idea if the FBI has been by to have a look. If I store everything on google's "Gdrive" I may never know until I'm dissapeared to the Gitmo if somebody's been snooping.
Also there is a memory-hole problem. I often save local copies of news stories or other interesting web pages. All too often I will return to a story or site later and find it either gone or altered. My most recent encounter with this was the USGS high-resolution color aerial photograph database. Photos of the White House, US Naval Observatory (the VP's Residence), and US Capitol building are blurred. In addition many road and rail bridges have had small blacked out areas added along side them. Sometimes it is something as simple as someone taking down a personal page for whatever reason.
Thanks but I'll keep the master copy of my data local for now
Re:Can the backbones handle it? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem I saw time and time again was that nobody could feed me enough bandwidth to max out my connection. I never knew what top speed it was capable of because nobody could serve me faster than around 10MB/sec which is the fastest I ever saw it, and this was from leeching 15 sites at once.
Generally, most big file shops (fileplanet, gamespy, download.com) have QOS and bandwidth limiting in effect on their routers. They all started doing this when broadband became more common to make more of their measley bandwidth available to more simultaneous users. When you have 100 people leeching from you on cable at 500KB/sec you start sweating, and choke them down. Ultimately everyone started charging for leeching services.
I don't see this attitude changing, and fiber to the curb, with widespread adoption and availability, will only exasperate the problem further. They thought it was bad when people got cable and dsl...just wait until the leechers can leech orders of magnitudes faster.
Then again, those with privileged upstreams tend to serve and share..so maybe there will be a balance point eventually. I still think a sort of Bittorrent-ish webserver app needs to hit the mainstream and run as a background service on broadband-enabled computers to prevent slashdottings.
Re:Just called (Score:3, Interesting)