The New Hotness

The current FiOS triple-play deal is $90/month for two years, plus the usual unknowable taxes & fees.

The flyer touts numerous advantages, including this bit of seemingly significant numerology (emphasis theirs):

50X MORE BANDWIDTH THAN CABLE

America’s top-rated broadband. With FiOS Internet, you get an average download bandwidth capacity per household that’s 50 times that of cable.^

They used a caret because disclaiming earlier claims had burned through *, †, and ††.

Anyhow, the ^ leads you to this baffling explanation:

Based on FiOS GPON download access network bandwidth capacity of 2,400 Mbps and 32 households & cable capacity of 160 Mbps and a typical node size of 125 households for DOCSIS with 4 bonded channels.

Now, if that doesn’t make you all giddy with desire and admiration, I don’t know what will.

The numbers don’t quite work out, but that’s in the nature of advertising. The upstream bandwidth oversubscription seems to be:

• FiOS: (15 * 32) / 2400 = 0.2
• Cable: (15 * 125) / 160 = 11.7

Ratio: 58.6. If you assume the cable cap is 12 Mb/s, the ratio is 46.8. Evidently, Verizon puts the cable cap at exactly 12.8.

A bit of rummaging shows that FiOS generally uses BPON, with a downstream limit of 622 Mb/s downstram, which would give a non-bragworthy ratio of 1.25. Whether we have GPON running past the house is unknowable.

They’ve eliminated all the kickbacks and incentives, so $90/month now seems to be the standard FiOS triple-play price. If we actually wanted TV, it would be attractive.

As you might expect, there’s another bold claim sporting a double caret (^^) further down the page.