Last week, Verizon offered a promotional deal on FiOS, its high-speed fiber internet service. Ordinarily the offer -- $80 for 300 Mbs internet when bundled with phone and television -- wouldn't be noteworthy. But FiOS development has long been stalled, and the promotion gave some hope that the company would resurrect the project and roll it out to new cities to compete with Google's ultra-high-speed internet service.
But alas, it was not meant to be. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam told investors at a conference on Monday that the company still has no plans to expand the service into new cities, Fierce Telecom reports.
"The point for us is that there might be a couple of things on the fringe going in and digging up yards and deploying fiber in a lot of new markets isn't in the cards," McAdam reportedly told investors. "More and more things are going mobile and I think there are more opportunities to partner out of market with companies that are there versus us going in and deploying FiOS."
Verizon began offering FiOS in some cities in 2005, but deployments stalled after only a few years. Last year, the company told investors that it had no plans to expand the service to new cities.
"I think ex-Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg was very bullish on fiber," telecom industry watcher Karl Bode told us earlier this year. "But after retirement, he was replaced by executives who wanted to focus more heavily on wireless, given the lower cost of deployment and the absolute killing that can be made charging users a significant amount per gigabyte."
And it's not just FiOS. Verizon and other companies have become more wary of all fixed-line services. "I think both Verizon and AT&T have made the decision to hang up on any further fixed line broadband competition and are happily letting those users flee to cable," he said. "Cable in turn will help them by directing their users to wireless services. We’ve effectively just seen the birth of a significantly less competitive broadband market where cable has a monopoly on fixed line broadband, and nobody appears to have noticed."
But Google Fiber, which offers speeds more than 3 times that of FiOS, has pressured some companies such as Century Link as well as mom and pop providers like Wicked Broadband to start offering gigabit connections. Google, meanwhile, is slowly moving into new markets. But don't expect nationwide roll out to be quick.
For now, municipal programs such as those pioneered by Chattanooga, Tennessee and Lafayette, Louisiana may be the best shot most communities have at getting gigabit speeds.
