No Gigabit Broadband for You

Ashburn, Virginia, is the broadband data centre of the world with scores of huge cloud facilities dotting the landscape everywhere. Massive optical fibre based bandwidth abounds along its roads and trails exchanging Petabytes of data. Very low latency interconnection meshes exist because the area was historically the principal global DARPA Internet node known as MAE-East, because the master root server of its Domain Name System (DNS) was located here, and because large numbers of computational and bandwidth-hungry Federal agency customers exist nearby. Much of my professional career over the decades was spent in senior positions at companies and agencies that enabled this support infrastructure.

The planned community of seniors in which I reside in Ashburn was built sixteen years ago. One of its notable features was Verizon FIOS optical fibre drops to every residence with Ethernet cabling internally. A then relatively fast 50 Mbit/s service was offered. It was sufficient for most basic purposes at the time.

As the years passed, I upgraded our residence internal network and equipment to increasingly inexpensive Gigabit/s capacity. The current low-cost state of the art is 2.5 Gbit/s with 10 Gbit/s getting cheaper by the day. The expectation was that Verizon would do the same for their FIOS service to the house. With Google rolling out Gigabit fibre offerings around the U.S., it was assumed that certainly Verizon in the world’s broadband capitol, and for a community of upscale professionals outside Washington DC, the residents would be provided with the new Gigabit norms of connectivity.

The community was peppered a few weeks ago with a postal flyer from Verizon advertising “A special offer for you” that stated a “Fios Gigabit Connection for $79.99” with “your Fios router rental on us.” The offer was explicitly footnoted with “offer valid for a limited time only for eligible existing Fios customers.” It seemed like the modern age of Gigabit broadband had finally arrived. My current FIOS connectivity has remained a consistent 80 Mbit/s – about on par now with what is available in Trinidad and Tobago.

With some delight, I contacted the Verizon business office to take them up on the Gigabit connection offer and place an order. It also enabled conversion to good 4K TV streaming services. The first service representative, however, said that the offer could not be honored because it didn’t apply to existing customers. After faxing the Verizon postal flyer to a supervisor, they admitted it that it applied and promised to follow up. After two days, of hearing nothing, a similar call was made, and similar answer received. Two days after that, a service representative was reached who finally fessed up - stating that we were living in a “non central office upgraded community.” He said we were “lucky to be getting 80 Mbit/s” and suggested it was unclear when they would bother to swap out the needed equipment at their central office.

In other words – like a variant of the old Seinfeld Soup Nazi episode – it was "no Gigabit broadband for you." So, we must live with poor Third World country connectivity in the world’s broadband data centre capitol. Perhaps we can ask Mr. Google to help provide their Gigabit “soup.”