Verizon today added a new 150/35 Mbps tier to its FiOS broadband access service, effectively bumping by three times the previous 50Mbps peak and almost doubling the previous upload speed of 20Mbps. According to the company, the new plan's downstream speed is fast enough to download a 1GB file in roughly a minute, is three times faster than Time Warner's fastest Internet offering and as much as 50 percent faster than Comcast and Cablevision.

Upstream rates are also 30 percent faster than Cablevision and Comcast and a whopping seven times faster than Time Warner. Of course all this speed comes at a premium - between $195 and $215 per month, depending the length of the contract and whether the subscriber buys Verizon's phone service as well. But while the majority of users probably won't be able to afford this new service, at least some previous customers will get a speed bump with no change in price: the 50/20 Mbps tier can now handle 60 Mbps down 35 Mbps up.

Back in August the company completed a real-world field test in which it pumped data at nearly 1Gbps speeds, while more recently Verizon hit another milestone, delivering 10 Gbps through a trial run of advanced XG-PON2 technology.