For the first time in years, consumers may be getting real competition in telecom services. Verizon Wireless announced Wednesday that it will speed up its super-fast fiber-optic service in 10 new states.
The expanded network will be available to 10 million consumers beginning next week and will reach 18 million people by 2010, Verizon said. FiOS will be available in various configurations ranging from 50 megabits per second downstream and 20 Mbps upstream to 10 Mbps downstream and two Mbps upstream.
The expansion upgrades FiOS customers in parts of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Those customers previously were limited to a range of 30 Mbps downstream and 15 Mbps upstream to five Mbps downstream and two Mbps upstream.
EVER-GROWING DEMAND
Verizon sees ever-increasing demand for bandwidth as users download and upload large media files like video and high-resolution photos. "As our customers shoot and send their own photos and movies, work at home more often, and expand their home networks, they love the faster speeds FiOS delivers," President and CEO Denny Strigl said.
The announcement came as Comcast announced a slowdown in rolling out its faster cable network, based on DOCSIS. That network will offer 80 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream.
Verizons announcement doesnt reflect any new investments in the network. "This is not an infrastructure upgrade; its a loosening of the speed caps by Verizon," said George Ou, senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in an e-mail. "Verizon fundamentally has a lot more bandwidth than any DOCSIS 1.1 or 3.0 network," the technology on which cable networks are based. "Were talking many times more bandwidth," Ou added.
IMPRESSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE
"The first DOCSIS 3.0 implementations are 76/27 Mbps down/up shared amongst a cable node consisting of anywhere between 200 and 400 users," Ou said. "So in an absolute worst case situation where 200 users are using their cable broadband service at full throttle at the same time, you get .380/.135 Mbps per user, or 380/135 Kbps per user."
By comparison, the first implementations in Verizons FiOS service is 622/155 Mbps down/up shared between fewer than 32 homes, Ou said. Worst case: 19.4/4.8 Mbps per FiOS customer if everyone tries to use their FiOS service at full throttle at the same time, which isnt likely to happen. And, Ou said, Verizon can upgrade over the existing fiber to 2488/1244 Mbps speeds.
"So what Verizon is doing is doing is opening up their speed caps to allow faster bursting, and theyre taking advantage of statistical multiplexing since its a fact that most customers will not be using the network at the same time," Ou explained. "Whats so impressive about FiOS isnt so much the advertised speeds they offer but the massive capacity of the infrastructure."
CABLE CONSTRAINTS
Cable companies can compete by doing "node splits where they chop up their neighborhoods into smaller pieces so that their consumers will have less congestion as demand for devices like the Netflix Roku grows," Ou said. Roku is a set-top box for streaming Netflix movies to a TV set.
"Just nine Roku streaming devices on a single DOCSIS 1.1 network will use up all the capacity in a cable node," Ou said. In addition, Comcast and other cable companies can do virtual node splits with leftover channels or, much more expensively, physically split nodes.
"The big problem for cable is that theyre required to allocate all those channels to the analog TV channels until 2012 by the FCC, so the total number of channels available to cable is scarce for now," Ou said. "This is why its so important to converge TV and Internet onto a single fat pipe where resources can be more efficiently shared, and the only way to do that is with intelligent networks."
The expanded network will be available to 10 million consumers beginning next week and will reach 18 million people by 2010, Verizon said. FiOS will be available in various configurations ranging from 50 megabits per second downstream and 20 Mbps upstream to 10 Mbps downstream and two Mbps upstream.
The expansion upgrades FiOS customers in parts of California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington. Those customers previously were limited to a range of 30 Mbps downstream and 15 Mbps upstream to five Mbps downstream and two Mbps upstream.
EVER-GROWING DEMAND
Verizon sees ever-increasing demand for bandwidth as users download and upload large media files like video and high-resolution photos. "As our customers shoot and send their own photos and movies, work at home more often, and expand their home networks, they love the faster speeds FiOS delivers," President and CEO Denny Strigl said.
The announcement came as Comcast announced a slowdown in rolling out its faster cable network, based on DOCSIS. That network will offer 80 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream.
Verizons announcement doesnt reflect any new investments in the network. "This is not an infrastructure upgrade; its a loosening of the speed caps by Verizon," said George Ou, senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, in an e-mail. "Verizon fundamentally has a lot more bandwidth than any DOCSIS 1.1 or 3.0 network," the technology on which cable networks are based. "Were talking many times more bandwidth," Ou added.
IMPRESSIVE INFRASTRUCTURE
"The first DOCSIS 3.0 implementations are 76/27 Mbps down/up shared amongst a cable node consisting of anywhere between 200 and 400 users," Ou said. "So in an absolute worst case situation where 200 users are using their cable broadband service at full throttle at the same time, you get .380/.135 Mbps per user, or 380/135 Kbps per user."
By comparison, the first implementations in Verizons FiOS service is 622/155 Mbps down/up shared between fewer than 32 homes, Ou said. Worst case: 19.4/4.8 Mbps per FiOS customer if everyone tries to use their FiOS service at full throttle at the same time, which isnt likely to happen. And, Ou said, Verizon can upgrade over the existing fiber to 2488/1244 Mbps speeds.
"So what Verizon is doing is doing is opening up their speed caps to allow faster bursting, and theyre taking advantage of statistical multiplexing since its a fact that most customers will not be using the network at the same time," Ou explained. "Whats so impressive about FiOS isnt so much the advertised speeds they offer but the massive capacity of the infrastructure."
CABLE CONSTRAINTS
Cable companies can compete by doing "node splits where they chop up their neighborhoods into smaller pieces so that their consumers will have less congestion as demand for devices like the Netflix Roku grows," Ou said. Roku is a set-top box for streaming Netflix movies to a TV set.
"Just nine Roku streaming devices on a single DOCSIS 1.1 network will use up all the capacity in a cable node," Ou said. In addition, Comcast and other cable companies can do virtual node splits with leftover channels or, much more expensively, physically split nodes.
"The big problem for cable is that theyre required to allocate all those channels to the analog TV channels until 2012 by the FCC, so the total number of channels available to cable is scarce for now," Ou said. "This is why its so important to converge TV and Internet onto a single fat pipe where resources can be more efficiently shared, and the only way to do that is with intelligent networks."
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