Today's the day lots of broadband analysts have been waiting for with baited breath for months: Verizon announced today that their techs are upgrading FiOS to G-PON technology.

So, did you take the day off work to celebrate? Are you wearing a pointy paper hat and scarfing down cake yet? Why not?

If the term "gigabit passive optical network" doesn't make you tingle like champagne bubbles, don't worry. In a nutshell, they're adding some new electronic doo-dads (or "doohickeys," depending on what region you're in) to the FiOS network to increase the bandwidth by four times greater downstream, and eight times greater upstream.

Although current FiOS customers can "only" (ha!) get download speeds of 50 Megabits-per-second, the network itself was already equipped for speeds of 100 Mbps, which Verizon began experimenting with last year, even before the G-PON upgrade. But according to Verizon Senior VP of Technology, Mark Wegleitner, "The G-PON deployment also illustrates the future-proof aspects of FiOS: We can use the same fiber network we use today but enhance the speed and capacity with new electronics in our central offices and at the customer premises."

Nice. So what will we need all that crazy bandwidth for in another five, ten or twenty years? Beats me -- maybe Techno-Guru Lloyd would know. Hey, when I was rocking dial-up in the late nineties, waiting 5 minutes for a page to load, I never would have guessed I'd be watching streaming movies and TV shows online in another few years. But isn't it better to be prepared? I guess Verizon thinks so.

Posted by Jim 2.0 | tagged: bandwidth, G-PON, upgrade, speed, Mbps, internet, FiOS, network