With all of the recent talk about how broadband caps for US Internet services are growing among ISPs, one company that is holding their ground on this issue is Verizon. The company's FiOS service has been a leader in offering super-fast Internet service to the regular household at competitive prices where it is offered. More importantly, FiOS subscribers don't have to worry about pesky broadband caps like AT&T and other ISPs have recently put into place.
According to GigaOM, Verizon's director of media and entertainment services, Joseph Ambeault, is quoted as saying, "Our network is always engineered for big amounts of data and right now there are no plans [to implement caps]." While he did say later that "you never want to say never because things could change," we think that's an executive hedging beta rather than a hints of putting in broadband caps.
Currently, Verizon FiOS offers up to 150 Mpbs speeds for home connections but they have been testing connections that provide speeds of up to 10 Gbps for shared downstream Internet service in a few select locations. All of this activity is taking place even as ISPs like AT&T, Comcast, Charter and others put in restrictive broadband caps on their customers. AT&T has even claimed that its customers wanted broadband caps put in place. Currently, over half of all broadband subscribers in the US are under some kind of broadband cap. These caps have been called money grabs by Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix which is currently the single biggest source of Internet traffic in the US due to the popularity of its streaming video service.
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