Out of the three RBOCs, Verizon is the most aggressive in overbuilding its respective copper networks with Fiber to the premises (FTTP) services, but if you're not in an existing community that's been wired up with fiber it's unclear when your community will, if ever, get the service anytime soon.
While Verizon will fulfill its obligations to bring FTTP-based services in major cities such as Washington, D.C., New York City and Philadelphia, other major cities such as Baltimore and Boston don't appear to be part of the current deployment plan. Instead, Verizon is focusing on securing video franchises with smaller communities in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
To date, Verizon offers FiOS service in 16 East Coast states, while it's selling off various properties in the Midwest and the West Coast to Frontier Communications. Verizon has not ruled out expanding FiOS to additional communities beyond 2010, but in January company CEO Ivan Seidenberg said it will dial down its FiOS marketing machine because of the economy's effect on its large business customer revenue. During Q4 2009, Verizon missed its TV subscription addition targets for the year and the fourth quarter.
In addition to the weak economy, the thousand dollar-plus installation costs aren't exactly cheap. At the same time, the service has enabled Verizon to keep up with cable competitors, who not only are continually taking digital phone subscribers away from the telcos, but can achieve 100 Mbps speeds over their existing HFC network infrastructure.
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- CED via AP has this article
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