Verizon serves up 4G LTE DSL replacement service

If you live in a rural area where broadband choice is either limited to a low speed DSL line or nonexistent, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) will be happy to provide you with its 4G LTE home service.

After dropping hints about the service at various financial conferences, the service provider has finally introduced its HomeFusion broadband wireless service, FierceCable reports.

Targeted at serving rural markets, the telco claims it will be able to deliver download speeds from 5 to 12 Mbps and upload speeds of 2-5 Mbps.

The initial target markets for the service will be in areas that FierceCable says will challenge dominant cable operators Charter (Nasdaq: CHTR), Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC) in addition to fellow Baby Bell AT&T (NYSE: T) in Dallas, Texas. In addition to Dallas, Verizon will offer the service in Birmingham, Ala., where Charter and AT&T offer broadband Internet access, and Nashville, Tenn., where it could compete with Comcast and AT&T.

However, as Verizon markets the HomeFusion service across its entire LTE footprint in 2013, they will likely end up competing against Frontier (Nasdaq: FTR), which purchased Verizon's rural lines and is now upgrading these long-ignored lines to deliver higher speed ADSL2+-based broadband services.

Eligible users will have to be willing to shell out $200 so a technician can install a cylindrical antenna that's about the size of a 5-gallon bucket.

Verizon is offering two plans: a $90 per month plan that includes 20 gigabytes of data or a $120 a month plan with 30 gigabytes of data. Users that exceed their usage caps will face a $10 per gigabyte of overage on both of the plans.

While the service may be tempting for users who have no broadband at all, the service caps will not sit well with a growing population of users that are using their connections to view popular video streaming services like Netflix (Nasdaq: NFLX) and Hulu.  

For more:
- FierceCable has this coverage
- see the release
- and this Boston Globe article

Commentary: Where we're at with broadband stimulus and rural Internet access

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