This morning we noted that Qwest's earnings report made an off-hand reference to the company offering 20Mbps speeds. While listening in on the Qwest earnings conference call, we heard Qwest CEO Ed Mueller announce that the company would be spending $300 million over the next two years to bring faster speeds to 1.5 million Qwest customers.

"As we look to the future we're convinced that increased bandwidth to our customers is critical for long term success," insists Mueller (obvious statement of the week). "We're happy to announce that our board has approved the expansion of our fiber to the node plan."

The CEO notes they'll spend between $70-100 million on FTTN this year and another $200 million next year. "We really believe that this is the responsible way to get our bandwidth to our customers," insists Mueller. Considering Qwest serves around 10 million customers, it's responsible, but not particularly ambitious.

With pair bonding to the home, we believe it may be possible to (offer 40Mbps). -Qwest CEO Ed Mueller

Compare Qwest's $300 million plan to the plans of the other baby bells. AT&T plans to spend $6.5 billion for U-Verse VDSL deployment over the next few years, while Verizon has earmarked $23 billion for FiOS FTTH service over the next five.

Qwest's plan will bring speeds of at least 20Mbps to 1.5 million Qwest customers. It's still not clear if they're planning on ADSL2+ or VDSL, but the latter seems more likely. "With pair bonding to the home, we believe it may be possible to double that speed," says Mueller.

Mueller insisted that the company was sticking with satellite as their video bundle option, and won't be pursuing IPTV like AT&T. That's in keeping with previous company statements that they'll continue to rely on bundled DirecTV service and portal content as their video play.

Other than that, Mueller wasn't specific on whether the technology was VDSL or ADSL2+. Nor was he clear on what new services would be added, which didn't particularly impress call analysts. "I can’t give you all the products and services today that would be put on there," said the CEO. "It would be crazy to think I knew them all."

We were the first to get wind of this plan over the summer, when we obtained leaked documents highlighting potential launch markets. According to the material, the FTTN service is supposed to be available to 8% of Qwest customers by the end of 2007 and 24% of Qwest's customers by the end of 2008.