I ran a rigorous series of tests comparing Fios with the Comcast basic cable-modem service, using an Internet speed test site accessed from a hard-wired Windows PC. The service hasn't been down for even a minute since then.
It took two visits from Verizon crews to install Fios - one to lay a fiber-optic cable to my house, and another to install the indoor electronic gear. I chose the middle of three Fios plans - 15 mbps downstream and 2 mbps upstream. Comcast has been working on its own higher-speed solution, and I expect Comcast to match or exceed the Fios downstream speed in these parts of the country where Fios is available in the next few months. So far, Fios is available to fewer than - million homes and business in selected areas in 15 states, including the Maryland suburb where I live. This speed boost, however, isn't the kind of transforming event that people experience when they move from dial-up to broadband there's a limit to the discernible speed increase you can get when downloading Web pages and e-mail. And on my laptops connected via a Wi-Fi wireless network, which tends to degrade Internet speeds, the speed increase has been especially noticeable. On some tasks, it is markedly faster than Comcast. I have been pleased with Fios's speed and reliability, which are true to Verizon's claims. I had Fios installed in my house in July, and I've been comparing it with Comcast's basic cable-modem service. There are also two other Fios plans: 5 mbps downstream and 2 mbps upstream for $40 a month and 30 mbps downstream and 5 mbps upstream for $200 a month. Generally, Internet providers offer much faster downstream speeds than upstream speeds. All such services have two modes: downstream, for downloading Web pages, e-mail and files and upstream, for uploading e-mail or files. A service running at 10 megabits per second is more than 13 times as fast as Verizon's base DSL service. They get a race car, while Americans are stuck with a bicycle.Ī megabit per second (mbps) connection moves about 1,000 times as much data every second as a kilobit per second (kbps) connection. But in Japan and Korea, families can buy moderately priced Internet service measured in the tens of megabits per second. But there's a problem: What passes for high speed in this country is pathetically slow compared with Internet service in some other countries.įor instance, Verizon's entry-level DSL service, at 768 kilobits per second for downloads and 128 kilobits per second for uploads, is considered high-speed here. High-speed Internet connections have finally gone mainstream in the U.S.