My dad had Verizon FIOS broadband installed at his home in New York about a year ago. It still isn’t here in SoCal, which I suppose is understandable….but I can’t wait to have it..
FIOS is a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service that puts a fiber optic connection to the internet in your own home, giving you ridiculous bandwidth — as much as 30mbps download and 5mb upload speeds. I don’t know about the rest of you, but my upload is capped at 384K right now - I wanted DSL so I could have speeds that were ten times faster than dial-up (as the commercial goes) — but FIOS? FIOS is ten times faster than DSL…
You can learn all you ever wanted to know about it over at Verizon’s Site. They even have a couple of flash based games so you can….”play with FIOS.”
Now, I don’t know how the actual speeds in your web browser will turn out, but here’s what they offer and what it’ll cost to brag to all your neighbors (or son) about it:
For $34.95, you get 5Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream.
For people in states that already have good broadband, the download speed will probably seem the same here — the big difference will be in upload speed. As I mentioned, my own DSL upload speed sputters along at about 384Kbps by comparison. The last office I worked at bought the top-tier “business DSL package” from SBC to support the entire office and it managed to eek out a staggering 3Mbps/down, 768Kbps/up…all for a hefty fee. There’s just something about broadband out here in California - it’s terribly slow, which is surprising given that so many Internet companies are based out here. Go figure.
For $44.95, you get a whopping 15Mbps downstream and 2Mbps upstream.
This is what my Dad has. (For $10 more, why not?)
Finally, for those who are fortunate (or foolish) enough, they offer a package with 30Mbps downstream and 5Mbps upstream for $179.95.
Make no mistake - I’m a proud member of the foolish camp. …even if it means peanut butter sandwiches three times a day, seven days a week.. Food is fuel…but bandwidth is time, and time is money when you are behind your laptop all day waiting for pages to load..
The ridiculous 30mbps download speed (heck, even the overdone 15mbps download speed) is great, but you’ll never actually get speeds anywhere near that…at least for now, anyway. You might be able to download at this new blinding rate, but the servers and family members that are sending you webpages and 300MB Little League movies are still uploading them to you at the same speeds they always have.. The weakest link in the chain ends up being the fastest speed you’ll get…
This isn’t any different from the dawn of cable broadband in 2000, and things will inevitably catch up….but the real benefit to this service - the ridiculous 5mbps upstream that is getting the most media attention - will be unattainable if not nonsensical for most households at the $179.95 price point. I wonder if it will come down in price?
One other interesting thing….and I wish I could find the pictures my dad had sent me a year ago….is that when they say they’re coming to “install” it, they come to INSTALL it. They had to take a rotary hammer to the side of dad’s house, drill a hole from the outer bricks through the inner wall, run the fiber optic lines in, and get it all wired for him.
He doesn’t have the same limp dsl or cable modem that we all hide on the floor or behind our monitors, either — he has a steel box the size of a microwave oven bolted to the wall with a few different things inside it. The extra equipment inside the box is necessary to turn the pulses of light coming through the fiber optic cable into something that the computer can understand, and then vice versa.
It is amazing where technology is headed with this stuff. And this is nothing — FTTH pales in comparison to the speed records they shattered on Internet2’s Abilene network…but I’ll save that for another time.
I wonder if we’ll even talk about this stuff in another five years? When was the last time you worried about MCI, Sprint or AT&T dropping one of your long distance calls? Heck, when was the last time you had a long distance company? 
I found a great article with more information about broadband and its history over at Wikipedia. It’s interesting because it talks about some of the alternatives that are around the corner like using our existing electrical power grid for broadband networking.
For those of you who want to “Grab the Light” as soon as humanly possible like me, I stumbled across a great site called FTTHblog that is packed with information and updates about fiber to the home.
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