Verizon Steps it Up, Now Offering 500Mbps Quantum FiOS Service

At the moment, the rollout of gigabit Internet services, arguably spearheaded by Google last summer, has been modest. However, as we discussed just last week, it does seem to be picking up in pace, and with a fantastic side-effect: other ISPs are taking notice, and that's bound to mean good things for the consumer. With an announcement made by Verizon earlier today, this is already becoming evident.

How does 500Mbit/s down and 100Mbit/s up sound? That's what Verizon is planning to rollout to seemingly all of its FiOS markets in the near-future, and it's sure excited to tell you all about it; the company has even created a neat-looking graphic that explains the whys and hows of its service versus the competition:

This info-graphic contains a couple of interesting points. Downloading an HD movie on this connection? 64 seconds (or, about as long as it takes to go get a drink). 10 songs? Less than one second. The upload speed is nothing to balk at either, however; imagine uploading a PowerPoint presentation in less than half of a second, or uploading a huge 10GB backup to some cloud service in about 13 minutes.

If that's not enough to whet your appetite, then an enthusiastic Fowler Abercrombie, member of Verizon's FiOS team, is sure to get the job done:

Unfortunately, Verizon hasn't announced pricing for its 500/100 service yet, but we expect that to be released soon. Mentioned in our post last week, the company does offer 300Mbit/s packages at a couple of hundred dollars in some markets, but it's hard to say if that sort of pricing is going to carry right on over to this - but when competition lacks, the price isn't going to be cheap. As Google Fiber costs about $70/mo for a 1Gbit bidirectional connection in a handful of markets, that's a little depressing. However, the overall upside is obvious: the faster these rollouts occur, the faster ultra-high speed connections will become more affordable.