Verizon announces a new almost-gigabit internet plan starting at $70 / month

William Gayde

Posts: 382   +5

Verizon has announced that its internet plans will be getting a generous upgrade today. They have just announced a brand new Fios Gigabit Connection plan which will be available now to millions of customers around the country. The "gigabit" marketing name is a bit of a misnomer though since the actual speeds will be as fast as 940Mbps down and 880Mbps up. The overall rollout is scheduled to be the largest deployment of gigabit internet services ever.

As Google Fiber fades and the service provider price wars continue to rage, it's important to be able to provide fast service at an affordable price if a company wants to stay competitive. The new plan will be available in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Richmond, Va., Hampton Roads, Va., Boston, Providence and Washington, D.C. areas.

In addition, Verizon also plans to greatly simplify their offerings in these locations. Customers will have two offerings for Fios internet which include the $69.99 Fios Gigabit Connection, and a 50Mbps plan for $39.99. Considering customers could get a near 2000% increase in performance for just $30 more a month, the 50Mbps option seems to miss the mark from a value perspective.

The plan is also available in a triple play bundle with a two year contract. This includes the Gigabit Connection, TV, and phone for $79.99 in year one and $84.99 in year two. Existing Fios Instant Internet customers will soon automatically be upgraded to Fios Gigabit Connection and they will also see their bills lowered.

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I hope this extends to Cambridge. My wife and I are moving there for the fall semester and this would be awesome.

The modem needed for a gigabit connection must cost a pretty penny though.
 
Maybe in 10 or 20 years my area will get gigabit service. If I was betting big money, I'd bet it was closer to 20 years than 10. Though maybe by then we'll have wireless carriers competing with residential ISPs with unlimited 5G. Ah one can dream.
 
The modem needed for a gigabit connection must cost a pretty penny though.
Actually, most routers nowadays have a gigabit WAN port so it's not so uncommon for it to be supported, just no service to take advantage of it. If you buy it outright from Verizon, their router is $150. Considering the router also handles the MoCA handoff to the cable boxes (if you have FIOS cable) it is not hateful, but you can find it cheaper elsewhere.
 
The modem needed for a gigabit connection must cost a pretty penny though.
Actually, most routers nowadays have a gigabit WAN port so it's not so uncommon for it to be supported, just no service to take advantage of it. If you buy it outright from Verizon, their router is $150. Considering the router also handles the MoCA handoff to the cable boxes (if you have FIOS cable) it is not hateful, but you can find it cheaper elsewhere.
I visualized my router on a VMware server I have. Currently running Untangle. I can give it more RAM and CPU so it could hand 1 GIG if we ever get it.
 
That is cool! Any latency issues between the connection?
No latency...I am running the Free VMware Esxi server....My server has multiple NICs...With VMware you can setup virtual switches. I have two one for my LAN assigned to one NIC and one for my WAN assigned to a different NIC. The LAN NIC goes to the switch and my WAN NIC goes to my cable modem. The VM Router has two NICs one attached to LAN VSwitch and one on the WAN VSwitch.
 
Actually, most routers nowadays have a gigabit WAN port so it's not so uncommon for it to be supported, just no service to take advantage of it. If you buy it outright from Verizon, their router is $150. Considering the router also handles the MoCA handoff to the cable boxes (if you have FIOS cable) it is not hateful, but you can find it cheaper elsewhere.

I was price matching them yesterday on Amazon. For around $100 you can get whatever you want. Still a lot pricier than the lower tier modems (Right now, Amazon is selling my Netgear 340mbps cable modem for $45 and my 24mbps DSL modem for $25). Worth the upgrade if you can get it but still pricey.
 
"the 50Mbps option seems to miss the mark from a value perspective" Not the way I see it. That's a reasonable connection for less than half what Comcast charges. Seems like a pretty decent deal for a small household.
 
Come to Romania, we have 1Gbps download already. Upload is maybe half, around 500Mbsp.
But the cost is just 10$ per month.

Must be nice. Sorry, but some of us live in greedy America ;) Now I am curious why your internet does not cost as much.

After big cable companies get people used to paying outrageously exorbitant prices why would they ever make the same product available for less.

We (US Customers) get so used to being taken advantage of we cease to be outraged about it.

I can use this as an example: A rural electric company in my area has as of this year realized that they wanted to get a fiber internet service to the areas they service. Base customer cost for gigabit (I do not know estimated upload speeds) (in a sparsely populated area) will be $50/mo usd. The plan is slated to take 3 years to run all the fiber in three stages and it is estimated that the entire installation expense will be payed back in two years. I work with the president of the board for that company.

I was pretty astounded, I pay Spectrum Cable more for 15m down and 1.2m up.
 
This is only good if they dont put any throttling restrictions or bandwith cap. I would download at least 100gb of data every night if I had such bandwith.
 
WONDERFUL, But that is not my problem. It's the gig cap they have me on, and the "who are they kidding" unlimited plan they just rolled out. Here when they "throttle you down, they, in essence, just turn you off. Your internet is useless. Complaints go unanswered.
 
The cost is so low because the competition between ISPs is fierce in order to gain subscribers. The equipment they bought was brand new and pretty much state of the art, we moved directly from dial-up to cable connections to fiber optics easily.
We did not have DSL or ADSL.

The same with phone companies, they moved to 3G and then 4G pretty fast, there was no infrastructure or equipment for them so they also had to install brand new technology. And then competition pushed them to upgrade and offer better monthly plans.
Currently I pay around 13$ for unlimited calls, unlimited SMS anywhere in the country, 6Gb of traffic, unlimited calls to landlines in Europe and I think US and Canada, and some 4 hours included for calling mobile phones internationally.
 
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