Verizon says it’s completed a field trial in which it delivered a 1Gbps service to an existing Fios business customer.
The test involved taking a new fiber connection from an existing GPON system at the company’s Taunton call-switching office to a second optical network terminal (ONT) at the customer’s facility.
The second ONT was provisioned for 1Gbps service, and the speed was tested with a local speed test server over an optimized route, as well as across the public internet with a regional speed test server over 400 miles away.
Verizon said that the download speed for the link to the local server was a touch under a gigabyte per second at 925Mbps, with an 800Mbps connection to the remote server.
The customer’s existing Fios service was left in place, says Verizon, and showed no degradation in the voice, data or video services during the trial.
“This kind of bandwidth capacity will provide Verizon the ability to continue to meet Fios customers’ needs by offering more bandwidth to support services such as 3DTV, ultra HDTV, multiplayer gaming and HD video conferencing,” said Brian Whitton, executive director of Verizon’s technology group.
Google’s been promising this sort of speed in its planned experimental fiberoptic networks – but that of course requires a new installation. Verizon’s point is that this was achieved over an existing network.
But other Fios customers shouldn’t expect this sort of speed any time soon – the company’s fastest offering is currently 50Mbps.
The Federal Communications Commission says it aims to get 100Mbps service into 100 million homes by the end of the decade.
