Stacey Higginbotham of Gigaom reports that Verizon is launching a 150 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps upstream FiOS broadband tier.  Not only does this give Verizon the “bragging rights”, but they can actually back it up with an all fiber network that has a lot more headroom to grow.  That might be an understatement since FiOS uses Fiber to the Home (FTTH) technology that has already been tested at 10 Gbps which is shared between a maximum of 32 homes.

The cable broadband providers can technically offer a 160 Mbps downstream tier, but that’s the bandwidth shared between an entire neighborhood of a few hundred homes unless the cable provider allocates more than four 6-MHz channels to their downstream DOCSIS 3.0 network.

Verizon spent over $23 billion on the FiOS network to cover 12.5 million people, but they now have a network with all the capacity they need for the foreseeable future.  Their cable competitors had the benefit of not having to spend all that money up front, but they’ll be spending smaller chunks of money as time goes on doing node splits and channel adds to maintain sufficient broadband capacity.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]