UBS: Verizon may add 1.1M fiber subs this year

Verizon Communications could add another roughly 1.1 million subscribers to its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network this year, according to estimates made by UBS Investment Research.

Verizon hasn’t made subscriber growth projections for this year. In 2006, it projected serving 725,000 high-speed Internet subscribers over fiber and 175,000 television subscribers by the end of the year. It also projected passing a total of 6 million homes with its FTTP network by the end of last year, adding another 3 million more per year until 2010, when the network will pass 18 million premises. The company hasn’t said whether it achieved its goals for the end of 2006.

Verizon has said it intends to make a particular drive into multi-dwelling units (MDUs) this year, pointing out that about a fifth of its customers live in them. However, the company declines to quantify those plans.

A more aggressive push into MDUs is now possible thanks to new optical network terminals (ONTs) that serve multiple customers, a Verizon spokesman said. Verizon has completed lab testing of its vendors’ MDU ONTs--which were unavailable a year ago--and is “starting to apply” them, the spokesman said.

Verizon said it was testing MDU-centric ONTs as far back as the second half of 2005. Though the company had already been serving small MDUs with the same ONTs it deploys for single-family homes (MDUs with less than 10 units), the MDU-centric ONTs, offering a range of technologies such as Ethernet and VDSL to bring service to end users, were intended for larger MDUs with more than 10 units.

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