Verizon has announced this week that it will be adding a new, speedier tier to its FiOS fiber broadband offering, offering as high as 150Mbit/sec downstream and 34Mbit upstream.
The service will cost users $195 per month.
So far, Verizon is rolling out the service to 12 U.S. states, and D.C., with small businesses and residential consumers expected to be able to use it fully by the end of the year.
Verizon currently offers a 50/20Mbit plan for $140 per month, their fastest offering.
New customers or upgrading customers must sign up for a one-year agreement to get the $195 price for the new incredibly fast option.
FiOS is currently available to 12.5 million households in the U.S. with Verizon expecting to expand reach to 18 million.
With a 150Mbit connection, users can download full two-hour 1080p HD movies in under 4 minutes and average music tracks in 300 milliseconds.
Result for: broadband
Google has announced today that it has partnered with Delta, AirTran and Virgin America to offer holiday travelers free in-flight Wi-Fi for domestic flights in the U.S.
The promotion starts on the 20th and will end on January 2nd, 2011.
Google will offer the Wi-Fi through Gogo, which normally costs $11 per day for in-flight broadband.
The Google Chrome team is sponsoring the free Wi-Fi, but the company made sure to note you can access it with any browser.
Overall, the promotion is expected to affect 15 million travelers on 700 planes.
Google offered the same promotion last year for the same period.
Result for: broadband
Google has said today that they will begin testing their incredibly fast 1Gbps fiber high-speed broadband project in Stanford, California, whilst still evaluating applications sent in by other cities that want to test the network.
The company will start introducing the network early in 2011 to the Residential Subdivision at Stanford University, which happens to be just a few miles from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.
Google Product Manager James Kelly says the new implementation is a “beta” for the broader Google Fiber project.
At 1Gbps, the network is at least ten times faster than even the speediest of current home connections.
In February, Google announced that it was looking for a community in the U.S. with between 50,000 and 500,000 people to deploy the network, for free. 600 communities applied and one, Topeka, Kansas, even renamed itself “Google” for one month.
Google will introduce the winner by Christmas.
