Verizon issued a press release yesterday that said the telco was on track to continue the rollout of its FiOS TV service across the five boroughs of New York City in accordance with its franchise agreement.
Verizon said its TV service will be “available in parts or dozens more neighborhoods by the end of the year,” but didn’t say which neighborhoods.
Verizon, which competes with Time Warner Cable and Cablevision in the New York Metro area, said the service was launched in an additional 140 neighborhoods last year, representing a total of roughly 810,000 households. With last year’s additions, the service is available in 253 neighborhoods.
After reaching a franchise agreement with the city, the service was launched in July 2008 in 108 neighborhoods.
“Rollout of FiOS TV is on the fast track in the city,” said Christopher Creager, president of Verizon’s Northeast region. “We’ve continued to add features and have made numerous enhancements to FiOS TV since we first launched it in the city.”
Creager said that the company was on course with the deployment schedules established in the franchise agreement, which calls for the company to build out its all-fiber-optic network to all parts of all five boroughs by mid-2014. Verizon also has FiOS retail stores in each borough.
Earlier this month, Verizon launched two data tiers with faster upstream speeds in New York City and other areas.
In the fall of last year, Time Warner Cable introduced a residential and business DOCSIS 3.0-enabled service in its New York City footprint, while Cablevision launched a DOCSIS 3.0 service with speeds of 101 Mbps on the downstream across its entire footprint in the spring.
Cablevision and Verizon have been waging a war for subscribers in Westchester County outside of New York City, and today Verizon announced that the village of Pleasantville approved a franchise agreement for Verizon. The addition of the Pleasantville cable TV franchise makes 170 the total number of New York municipalities that have authorized Verizon to provide FiOS TV service.
