As has been said before, speed thrills, but the connection at the end kills. Thus, Verizon's (NYSE: VZ) announcement that it has successfully test speeds of nearly 1 Gbps over its FiOS network must be tempered by the sorts of devices can take advantage of those speeds at either end of the link.
Not to take anything away from what the telco has accomplished. Verizon seems to have hit overdrive in its ongoing race with cable. The test, conducted in June in Taunton, Mass. and announced yesterday, used a Motorola (NYSE: MOT) GPON system and an existing business customer location. A new fiber connection was run from an existing GPON system in Taunton to an ONT at the business customer's location that was provisioned for the 1 Gbps service tier. Speeds were then tested to a local server over an optimized route and across the public Internet to a regional speed test server 400 miles away.
"This trial demonstrated that the current architecture has sufficient headroom to allow for a progressive increase in capacity as needed by customers on our current GPON platform and validates our decision to support both residential and business services on the same platform," Vince O'Byrne, director of Verizon's technology organization and the trial's manager, was quoted in a news release.
For more:
- see this news release
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