Verizon CTO: 'We told you so' about FiOS

Verizon CTO Dick Lynch has a simple message to anyone who doubted his company's wisdom in building out a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network: We were right, you were wrong. Lynch put particular emphasis on chiding skeptical analysts and rival companies that tried to cast doubt upon Verizon's fiber plans. "In an attempt to maintain the status quo, our competitors did their best to create customer confusion around fiber-optic services," he said. "They claimed that their networks had been fiber for a decade, and they distributed misleading messages about the quality of FiOS. Their communications strategy was to create confusion and apathy and some people fell for it." Slideshow: Ma Bell's 25-year oddysey   Specifically, Lynch singled out a "potential customer" that told The Washington Post a few years back that "there's nothing on the Internet that requires that kind of bandwidth." Now, with the rise of YouTube, Facebook and other bandwidth-intensive Web applications, Lynch said that Verizon is having the last laugh. "With the exception of our competitors, everyone secretly hoped we would succeed," he said. "The industry experts would publicly say, 'Verizon is spending too much' or 'consumers don't need fiber.' But then they'd turn around and call us to find out how soon FiOS would be coming to their neighborhood." Verizon's FiOS services offer customers peak download speeds of 50Mbps and peak upload speeds of 20Mbps. Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Lynch crowed about his company bringing FiOS Internet services to an estimated 3.1 million subscribers in the United States. Cable companies this year have begun ramping up their tests for faster services to compete with FiOS, as Comcast and Cablevision have started rolling out new Internet services based on the DOCSIS 3.0 standard that will offer businesses potential peak download speeds of 100Mbps.

Verizon has said in the past that it is trialing 100Mbps FiOS technology, although the company has given no timeline for when that technology might hit the market.