Shortly after Comcast announced plans to incorporate DOCSIS 3.0 with speeds approaching 50Mbps and higher, Verizon is seeking to retain their DSL customers with faster speeds as well. Verizon will be expanding their fastest-tier DSL service, making it available to around 6.6 million people, significantly more than the less than 1 million it was available to prior.
The increased DSL speeds will go as high as 7mbps, and apparently is only being targeted in areas where FIOS isn't available. Those speeds still fall short of most cable offerings.
From a global perspective, even these speeds are rather unimpressive. The U.S. is still ranked fairly low for average broadband speeds worldwide along with Internet propagation. The size and layout of the U.S. makes broadband for everyone hard to accomplish however, so the stats looked at as absolute numbers only paint one side of the picture.