Verizon Communication delivered broadband speeds of almost 1 gigabit per second to a customer in Taunton, Mass. in June as part of tests of its FiOS fiber to the home network. The test customer achieved throughputs of 925 Mbps down and 800 Mbps up. Today, there’s not much one needs such speeds for — unless you’re sending terabytes of data round the web for scientific research or your computer is a massive torrent hub — but Verizon has its eyes on the future.
The company has been testing speeds of up to 10 Gbps in its labs, thinking that services such as 3DTV, desktop virtualization, remote storage, as well as wireless backhaul for the next generation of wireless technologies, will all require fatter pipes. Verizon’s 1 Gbps test was conducted using Motorola gear and required a change inside Verizon’s network, but not at the customer premise (which would result in more expensive deployments). The tests also shouldn’t be confused with Verizon’s efforts to bring even faster 10 Gbps speeds to the home, which uses a newer technology called XG PON rather than the GPON used here. The current GPON tech delivers 2.5 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream. Still, it’s a shame that Verizon has stopped its FiOS expansion while it seeks to improve the adoption in markets where it has built out fiber to the home already.
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