(Photo by enthusiastic FiOS fan Cayusa)

Big news from Verizon today: they've expanded their top FiOS Internet speeds of up to 50 megabits-per-second downstream, and up to 20 megabits-per-second upstream, to ALL of their service footprint. So, anywhere you can get FiOS, you now can get 50 down, 20 up.

But what if you don't know your bits from your bytes and want to know, in plain English, what all that crazy Internet speed really means?

Well, Verizon's Jim Smith has put together a fact sheet on why 50 Mbps matters, including a few nuggets I actually hadn't heard yet:

• "Every 2-3 years, consumers double their appetite for bandwidth."
  
• "Ten years ago, most homes had one to three broadband devices, usually PCs.  Today, there are five to 10 broadband devices in the home: PCs, TV set-top boxes, game consoles, MP3 hookups, camera links and electronic picture frames, each creating a bandwidth requirement to and from the home. A popular device this year is a still camera that sends pictures to the PC over a wireless home network."
  
• "In the next 10 years, there will be 25-100 IP devices in the home: pantry and refrigerator scanners, home information hubs in each room, Internet-connected TVs and stereos, HVAC controllers, home automation devices of all kinds, security equipment with video outputs." 

(Guess the Wurtz family got a head start on the whole kitchen-of-the-future thing with the wireless UPC scanner they got as part of their 2.0 makeover...nice!)

The fact sheet also has a couple of charts that show samples of various average file sizes, and how long they would take to download/upload on various Internet speed tiers:

Still, charts and descriptions really can't hold a candle to experiencing that kind of speed firsthand. The first time I got to try out a 30 Mbps FiOS connection, while shooting last season's episodes in the fall, my jaw literally dropped. I remember sitting in the Zaharkos' dining room one evening, frantically trying to upload photos to our Flickr page before we had to leave, because it literally took seconds, as opposed to the connection we had at the hotel, which took...well, I'm not sure, exactly, since I fell asleep waiting. You get spoiled pretty fast with a 30 Mbps FiOS connection --hopefully I'll get to experience 50 megs for myself soon...

Posted by Jim 2.0 | tagged: bandwidth, symmetrical, Mbps, internet, upload, download, FiOS