Verizon (NYSE: VZ) may have hung up on extending its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) FiOS service into new areas, but its recent move to wire 60 Park Place in Newark, N.J., shows that it is still keen on bringing the service to more users in its existing markets.
In a release, Verizon said that by bringing FiOS to this site, one of downtown Newark's largest buildings, it is one step closer to bringing its fiber network to every neighborhood in the city.
Although Verizon has been connecting homes to FiOS in parts of Newark since 2008, the 21-story office tower is the first large commercial building that will have access to the fiber network.
Verizon said that Newark is one of 70 municipalities in New Jersey where Verizon has committed to building out its fiber network. Thus far, Verizon has installed nearly 1.1 million feet of fiber optic cable and network infrastructure under and above the streets of Newark, making FiOS available to nearly 129,000 addresses in the city's five wards.
Already, users like Chip Hallock, the CEO of the Newark Regional Business Partnership, who relocated to 60 Park Place, are seeing the advantage of fiber-based services.
"Our new offices at the Military Park Building demonstrate the best that Newark has to offer by combining a central location in a historic office building with the technological advantage that Verizon FiOS provides," Hallock said.
Outside of New Jersey, Verizon's CFO Fran Shammo told investors in August that it has about 1 million homes in cities such as New York City and Washington, D.C., left to convert to fiber before it wraps up its entire conversion plan that it has been working on for three years.
Verizon's New Jersey and other nearby locations may be compelling, but a number of communities such as Boston and Buffalo, N.Y., will likely never see FiOS come to their town. This means they will have no option besides using slow DSL or churning to a cable provider for broadband service.
For more:
- see the release
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