“100Mbs Home FiOS Connection Test” would have been a more descriptive title, but you get the point.
Perhaps now we can replace envy of Swedish grandmothers’ broadband trials with the pride that we’ve got some good speed demos right here in the US of A.
Now that we’ve had this humming for a few months and with the general concern about US broadband speed, I thought a little conversation about the field trial might be of interest.
Verizon is “lighting” a couple of employee homes with 100Mbs connections. This is over the same network architecture (BPON) and on the same home equipment (same router, ONT, etc.) that we’ve been deploying since 2004.
To give you a flavor of this experience:
- This video is of Rich Guziewicz – at his home computer in Pennsylvania -- doing a speed test showing a sluggish 87.908Mbs result. But be kind and please note as he says. “this is not a lab environment… it’s on the same equipment that my neighbors have….”
- Below that is a Q&A with Rich, I asked GigaOm’s Om Malik to submit questions for Rich to give people who don’t live with these kinds of speeds what it’s like.
UPDATE: GigaOm has written a summary of the Q&A and some comment. Here is the full transcript of the interview he discusses:
Q1: how has the 100 megabit/s pipe changed your life - your online life in specific?
Rich Guziewicz – Since for the most part the Internet and most services that use the Internet don’t run that fast, it would be tough to say it’s a life-changing experience right now. The up-front answer is it works well. I use my 100 Mbps FiOS connection for typical web access (e-mail, news, etc), some online video, as well as for work (VPN access). I’ve certainly seen an impact when it comes to some downloads – they are quite fast. Additionally, the upstream rate is 10 Mbps, which has also been great for uploading files to work. The purpose of our engineering trial was to demonstrate that we can implement 100 Mbps downstream service over our existing B-PON FiOS architecture before we even transition to the faster G-PON (gigabit speeds) electronics - and we did! It is amazing to do some speed tests and see 90 + Mbps speeds register.
Q2: do you consume more video while connected at such high speed?
RG: Not really more than before. I visit streaming sites such as YouTube, Metacafe, and CNN but they don’t require super high speeds. Some video download sites might benefit but generally they don’t support very high speeds either. For instance, I have a 100 Mbps pipe to my home, but if I try to download a file from a certain HD video site, I find I may get only 3 Mbps of download speed, which I believe is a limitation of the site and its servers. I don't think the Internet, as a whole, is set up to take full advantage of the speeds which FiOS can offer. At least not yet. Think about it, though – 18 months ago we weren’t talking at all about us selling 50 Mbps and having customers using it – but that’s the case today. Who knows where we’ll go with 100 Mbps capability or what applications will arise to use it. One possibility that’s raised by our CTO, of course, is the simultaneous use of multiple devices in the home, such as 2 or 3 HD TVs, and multiple PCs or video on demand streams. Remember: in our FiOS network, our 100 Mbps path/wavelength is just for data only. The HDTV and overall broadcast video product rides on a separate wavelength and doesn’t compete with the data stream on the fiber. The scenarios I outline here will require lots of bandwidth for everything to work well at the same time – and FiOS will be able to handle it.
Q3: what are the new services have you started to use as a result of the increased bandwidth?
RG: Nothing that new yet. I've found that all the things I did on my PC with 15Mbps service, I can do with 100Mbps. If I visited web sites that were optimized to allow true 100 Mbps downloads, then I might be able to say it makes a difference. Downloading a 500MB file would take about 40 seconds instead of about 4 minutes. However, I think we are all a couple years away from that experience.
Q4: what has gotten worse for you from a faster connection?
RG: Nothing. Although I do have increased internal Verizon notoriety since I’m one of only two employees trying the 100 Mbps service, out of a total of 238,000 employees!
Q5: describe your broadband set-up, and what will you pay for this speed?
RG: I now have 2 FiOS PC data connections: 1 for home PC, 1 for work laptop, when needed.
I have 3 FiOS Set Top Boxes for FiOS TV (1 of which is HD with
DVR box), I also have voice service over FiOS – so I have the phone, data and video the triple play. My PC data connections are hard wired into my broadband home router via Ethernet cat5e cabling, as this provides better performance than wireless connectivity.
I currently pay $39.95 for my 15 Mbps downstream/2 upstream FiOS data
service (that includes an employee discount) and I'm very satisfied
with the service/pricing. As for the 100 Mbps service, since we’re only in the engineering test phase and we’ve made no decisions to market it yet, I wouldn’t offer any guesses on the pricing.
-end Q&A-
Please note: just because we can drive 100mbs to your FiOS connected home, doesn’t mean we are going to start tomorrow. For most users today, you wouldn’t be able to take advantage of such speed or see its full potential. Kind of like having a Porsche in a town with all dirt roads.
But the day is coming, and FiOS customers will be are already ready.