Verizon Upgrades Max DSL to 15 Mbps
Posted by Jesse Ward on Thursday, September 2, 2010 · 
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Verizon is throwing a bone to its customers that can’t receive FiOS service. The company has introduced a new DSL tier, offering 10-15 Mbps downstream/1 Mbps upstream, initially available to more than 4 million households and small businesses.
Verizon is attempting to defend its terrain, enticing its legacy DSL customers to stay with the company despite competitive offers from cable operators which offer faster speeds and VoIP triple-play bundles.
In fact, Amy Lind, consumer broadband research manager for the global technology market intelligence firm IDC, is quoted within the press release. “One of the issues with cable Internet is that its bandwidth capacity is shared by multiple users at a node, so the speed a customer actually receives can vary considerably depending on how many cable customers are online simultaneously. DSL-based High Speed Internet, on the other hand, offers each end user a dedicated connection, so its performance is more consistent all the time.”
The new 10 Mbps-15 Mbps service tier is priced $49.99 per month for residential customers with voice service from Verizon, and $59.99 per month as a stand-alone service. Verizon is utilizing ADSL2+ and the service requires that users reside within 7,000 feet from the central office.
According to LightReading, this might be Verizon’s last upgrade to its legacy DSL service. Indeed the service provider has elected not to deploy VDSL technology because the costs of building out fiber nodes closer to the customer to deliver VDSL aren’t as favorable as a complete fiber build.
The new 10 to 15 Mbps speed is the latest addition to Verizon’s existing suite of DSL services, which includes three residential tiers — 4 Mbps-7 Mbps, 1.5 Mbps-3 Mbps, and 768 Kbps-1 Mbps — as well as similar business packages. Note that Verizon has changed its marketing language, dropping the “up to” and simply quoting a range of realistic operational speeds.
For more, see this release.
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