Verizon launches near-gigabit speed Fios, rivaling Google Fiber
NEW YORK—When it comes to your Internet at home, you can never have enough bandwidth. Verizon gets that, and on Monday said it was ready to roll out near-gigabit speeds to more than 8 million potential customers in eight East Coast markets. .
The move turns up the heat on Verizon's competitors in the fast-changing broadband market. Rivals Comcast, Google Fiber and AT&T are also pushing hard on their own gigabit-per-second networks. The rival build-outs are generally good news for consumers.
How fast is fast? Verizon is promising downloads as fast as 940 megabits per second (Mbps) and uploads as fast as 880 Mbps. You'll be able to fetch an epic Hollywood blockbuster in seconds and share fast broadband among the growing number of home Internet-connected devices.
The price is right, but there's a catch. Verizon's Fios Gigabit Connection service will cost $69.99 for standalone service and start at $79.99 as part of a “triple play” bundle with TV and digital voice service. The prices, however, are for new customers only who order online; the second-year bundle price (under a two-year agreement) climbs to $84.99.
Existing Fios customers will be able to upgrade online starting April 30, at prices that will vary depending on your current level of service and what you're paying now. For example, a Fios subscriber getting 150 Mbps today will, as of April 30, be able to upgrade to Fios Gigabit for $20 more than she's currently paying, Verizon says.
Upgrade or fall behind
Verizon isn't the only company pushing blistering bandwidth speeds. Google Fiber and its heavyweight rivals in telecom and and cable are all competing in the same gigabit game. Cable companies have been embracing an industry standard known as DOCSIS 3.1. That's shorthand for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification, an approach for delivering fiber-like speeds over existing cable lines.
"Everywhere there is FiOS there is also a cable company that is upgrading now to DOCSIS 3.1," says analyst Roger Entner of Recon Analytics. "This means Verizon needs to upgrade to Gigabit ethernet or become uncompetitive. In some markets Verizon is ahead of the cable guys, in some it's behind."
Google Fiber was announced in 2010, and it was an early catalyst for lightening fast gigabit speeds as it attempted to disrupt the lock that telecom and cable companies had on broadband. The rollout didn't go as planned and parent Alphabet eventually halted expansion into new markets, providing an opening to rivals.
Whether you as a consumer can benefit from faster broadband depends almost entirely on where you happen to call home. "If you don’t live in one of these areas, you’re stuck with whatever is available, which in many cases may be only one or two options, likely a cable operator offering decent speeds plus a phone company offering something slower like DSL," says Jackdaw analyst Jan Dawson.
Eligible markets for the Fios upgrade include parts of New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., Hampton Roads, Va., Boston, Providence and Washington, D.C.
"Clearly Verizon will target its most acutely competitive markets first," says Erik Keith, an analyst with GlobalData.
In such markets, Verizon now has just two tiers of standalone service for new customers, the aforementioned $69.99 price for customers who buy into the latest offering, or $39.99 for folks for whom 50 Mbps is sufficient.
By way of comparison, in 2010, 50 Mbps was the top speed that Fios customers could get, says Verizon spokesperson Ray McConville, and they paid around $200 a month for the service. And it was just over three months ago that Verizon launched what it called the “Fios Instant Internet” service with symmetrical download and upload speeds of 750 Mbps.
In addition to being faster, the Gigabit offering is also significantly cheaper than Verizon’s Instant Internet, which cost $149.99 for standalone Internet service ($169.99 as part of a triple play package).
Under the latest offering, you may or may not need a new modem.
5G is coming
While no singular applications on the Web today can exploit gigabit speeds, the benefits come when you consider how many devices in the home require Internet connectivity, a trend that will only continue to grow in the Internet of Things (IoT) era. The NPD Group recently reported that there are now 734 million connected devices in use within U.S. Internet homes, averaging 7.8 connected devices per home. That’s an increase of 64 million installed and Internet-connected devices over the past year.
Verizon says that Fios Gigabit enables speeds that are 20 times what most people have today, and more importantly can connect 100 devices simultaneously.
During a recent demo of the Instant Internet service at Verizon’s New York offices, the company streamed multiple 4K videos while a variety of smart connected devices were humming along at the same time. The company also downloaded The Angry Birds Movie in 48 seconds.
Eventually, competition may come from next generation 5G wireless solutions in the home. But don't hold your breath. "It’s going to take many years to get that infrastructure deployed and get wireless speeds and prices that are competitive with fiber-based broadband," Dawson says. "For now, even though LTE can get up to some decent speeds, all the providers start to slow down service or charge overages once you get over some pretty low thresholds of data consumption each month, so wireless doesn’t really offer meaningful competition for home broadband connections today."
Keith agrees: "The reality is that for broadcast-quality TV, nothing beats a fixed, wireline network, and most fixed broadband services have no data caps."
Contributing: Eli Blumenthal @eliblumenthal
Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA Today Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter