Verizon recently announced at NxtComm trade show in Las Vegas that is was increasing its access speeds for its FIOS Fibre-to-the-home product. The company's COO Denny Strigl said in a statement "The appetite for bandwidth shows no sign of slowing down and neither will we. We've already had successful trials of the 100-megabit home, which will be a reality faster than anybody thinks.

Their new products will include a top of the line US$140 per month 50/20Mbps service, and their lower speed/lower cost 20/5Mbps, 10/2Mbps and bottom of the range 5/2Mbps.

Here in Australia Pivit have recently announced their new generation of fibre broadband plans which they have called Fi-Band. Available at all Pivit Fibre connected residential estates (Coomera Waters, Kelvin Grove Urban Village, Prince Henry at Little Bay and Sanctuary Cove), the new services deliver the fastest Internet upload speed available in Australia with the new 'TenTen' plans providing simultaneous 10Mbps download and upload speeds.

Peter Geale, Sales and Marketing Manager at Pivit commented that "10Mbps upload speed means that uploading photos to share with friends and family, or even a video to YouTube or other video sharing web sites is now a breeze. 10Mbps is more than 10 times the speed of the fastest upstream service offered by ADSL2+ services."

However, this is still not as fast as the download speed of up to 24Mbps offered by ADSL2+ (although this is limited to a very few). TransACT have introduced their Broadband offerings for their FTTH estate (Forde), which includes a 30/10Mbps product, but at a very pricey $134 per month. This also does not include the ISP fees which are an additional charge starting from $9.90 per month for a basic 200Mbytes, and $40 per month for a typical 10Gbyte service.

We are still far from the 1 Gb/s service available from HKBN or Via Europa, but we're getting there.