Verizon Fios: insanely cheap fiber to the home

Posted by - May 22, 2005

By Damien Stolarz for SiliconValleyWatcher

fiber cable image.JPG My friend recently got wired up in Topanga Canyon (part of LA county) with Verizon's new insanely fast fiber Internet. I later saw a driving billboard Verizon truck that said "Fios" on it and then I figured out it was their brand name for this service.

[picture courtesy Jacob Riskin]

The monthly prices are extraordinarily low:

5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39

15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49

30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199

(source: Verizon Fios - Packages & Prices)

With friends like that, who needs colocation facilities? Seriously though, I pay several hundred dollars for a 5Mbps downstream/768k upstream package from Time Warner. With the $199 Verizon package, you can get 5Mbps of upstream server bandwidth, which would let you serve almost 40 128k MP3 streams, or over a dozen 300Kbps video streams. This kind of upstream bandwidth is also sufficient for you to hook up your TiVo or PVR to the network and watch it in full quality in some other broadband downstream location. (While DVD bitrates are sometimes 6-8Mbps, the bitrates for PVR video are usually in the 2Mbps range, and DivX/Xvid movies are usually under 1Mbps.)

I'm still trying to figure out how to use my friend as my new ISP. He's in a canyon about 10 miles from me, so wireless won't work. Maybe he'll let me put my servers in his tool shed...

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