fios

Verizon Communications' wireless business continues to boost the company's profits as its landline business sputters, according to second-quarter earnings reports.

On Monday, Verizon reported a 12 percent increase in second quarter net income. The company reported that profits jumped to $1.88 billion in the second quarter from $1.68 billion during the same quarter a year ago. This increase came as the company only slightly grew its revenue, which was $24.12 billion for the quarter up from $23.27 billion a year ago.

Wireless once again proved to be the big growth engine for Verizon, which jointly … Read more

Verizon's Fios TV is coming to New York City starting Monday.

The phone company sent a media advisory on Friday about the launch and will provide more details about the service during a Webcast press conference Monday morning. New York City granted Verizon its TV franchise back in May. And on July 16th, the company won final approval to offer its TV service from the New York Public Service Commission.

Verizon has been aggressively marketing its Fios Internet and TV service in the New York City suburbs for the past couple of years. And the company has offered the … Read more

There's no question that Verizon Communications hit a home run with its aggressive fiber strategy.

The fiber-to-the-home network called Fios has enabled Verizon to supercharge broadband speeds and compete against cable in the TV market.

Fios also has helped future-proof Verizon's network. While its cable competitors buckle under the pressure of peer-to-peer traffic on their networks, Verizon has enough capacity in its network, thanks to its fiber upgrades, to weather the storm unscathed and work on its own timetable to find more efficient ways to handle peer-to-peer traffic.

Mark Wegleitner, Verizon's senior vice president of technology in … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Verizon Communications is looking toward big cities as the next big opportunity for its Fios broadband and TV service.

The company said Wednesday that it expects to get approval from the New York Public Service Commission to offer its Fios video service in New York City as early as next month.

"Our plan is to cover all of the 3.1 million households in all five boroughs in the next five to six years," Verizon's COO Denny Strigl said during a keynote speech at the NxtComm trade show here. "We will start this year as … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Verizon Communications is boosting speeds for its Fios fiber-to-the-home service, the company plans to announce Wednesday.

The company's COO Denny Strigl is expected to announce the speed upgrades during his keynote speech at the NxtComm trade show here. The upgrades come as Verizon customers use more bandwidth intensive applications such as video downloading and photo sharing.

"The appetite for bandwidth shows no sign of slowing down," Strigl said in a statement. "Neither will we. We've already had successful trials of the 100-megabit home, which will be a reality faster than anybody thinks."

As … Read more

As cable and phone companies slug it out in markets across the U.S., improving customer care is becoming a core part of their strategies.

For the past few years, cable and phone companies have been neck and neck in many markets. Cable companies have introduced new phone services to compete with phone companies, and phone companies have started offering competing TV services.

On the broadband front, cable and phone companies now offer similar speeds in feeds in many markets. While cable has historically been priced slightly higher than services offered from phone companies, these too are evening out in … Read more

On Tuesday, the Franchise and Concession Review Committee (FCRC) of New York voted unanimously to approve Verizon's proposal to provide Fios TV service in all five boroughs. The vote moves the service closer to becoming an option for customers in New York to choose over cable or satellite TV.

"If we are successful in the last steps of the approval process, we will deliver on our promise to begin offering Fios TV in parts of each of the five boroughs later this year," Monica Azare, Verizon senior vice president for New York and Connecticut, said in a press release.… Read more

Verizon Communications' hot streak continued during the first quarter of 2008.

The company said Monday that first quarter profits jumped about 10 percent to $1.64 billion, fueled by demand for its mobile phone service and fiber-to-the-home service called Fios.

Revenues grew about 5.5 percent to $23.8 billion, the company said. About $11.7 billion of that revenue came from its wireless business, an increase of about 13.2 percent from the first quarter of 2007.

There's no question that Verizon Wireless, which is jointly owned by Vodafone, has a good reputation as a wireless provider. Its … Read more

Verizon is running an ad implying that CNET gave its Fios TV service's picture quality a positive review, calling it "near-flawless." The reality is that a CNET Networks property did use that phrasing in a news story, not a review, and the words are taken out of context.

Adding to the confusion, CNET itself bears some of the blame.

Here's the all-important context: a series of Fios TV spots running in the New York metropolitan area and possibly elsewhere uses a couple of words clipped from a June 21, 2007, CNET News.com piece on Verizon's Fios service. The commercial flashes a quote on the screen that says "near-flawless" along with the CNET logo, while a voiceover proclaims: "Your HDTV doesn't want cable. Give it Verizon Fios, for picture quality the experts call 'near-flawless.'" Another, more-recent ad is also running with a slightly expanded logo-backed quote that reads: "A near-flawless TV experience." Check out the video, which CNET uploaded to YouTube, for the original spot.

Those words did appear on a News.com story (News.com and CNET Reviews are sister sites published by CNET Networks). But the context of the original News.com piece, titled "Verizon's fiber-optic payoff," reads quite differently from how Verizon is using it:

… Read more