Verizon to Soon Offer 300Mbit/s Internet Service

This is the kind of post where the title alone can drop jaws, but on account of being a journalist, it’s best we discuss it a little bit else I feel inclined to fire myself. Next month, Verizon will be overhauling its available FiOS packages and introducing a couple of new tiers. On the bottom rung, nothing will change at all; the most basic service offered will remain 15Mbit/s down and 5Mbit/s up. The top offering, as the title suggests, is 300Mbit/s, with a 65Mbit/s upload.

All of the tiers can be seen in the table below. Verizon is not surprisingly holding off on the pricing of each tier until the actual launch, but as the 150Mbit/s package will still remain (albeit with a boosted upload), you can expect that the 300Mbit/s package will cost significantly more than the current 150Mbit/s package. What I’ve typically seen is $1 per Mbit/s for such high-end packages, so expect it to be $250~$300/mo.

To give people an idea of what 300Mbit/s is capable of, Verizon gives a couple of examples, but the best one might be the example of a 2 hour HD video, which would clock in at 2.2 minutes if circumstances were perfect. 20 high-res photos, 2.8 seconds, 1 hour SD video, 20 seconds and 10 songs, 1.4 seconds.

These examples are for the most-part pointless, however, as very few servers you’ll ever connect to will allow such a fast connection. In my experience, Microsoft and Valve offers some extremely fast servers that might be able to showcase your connection well, but that obviously has limited use. Where speeds like this really come into play is with torrenting, or if you want to run a server from home and want really fast access to it from anywhere. But, as mentioned above, it’s not going to be cheap.

It’s also worth noting that 300Mbit/s isn’t some sort of record. In the UK, there’s an on-going 330Mbit/s service test, although it does appear that people rarely ever get close to its full potential.

Another factor that some should be made aware of is that at 300Mbit/s+, standard wireless connections are being exceeded, and even some wired (if running a 100Mbit/s LAN). To experience such enormous speeds at full tilt, you’ll want a very good router, and full 1Gbit/s network speeds. Oh, a couple of large hard drives wouldn’t hurt, either.