We've always wondered where precisely Verizon would stop deploying FiOS, as the company reached neighborhoods their number crunchers deemed unprofitable or poor investments. That determination is based on the carrier's ultra-secret statistical analysis -- which for obvious reasons they've never felt compelled to share since it digs into a wide variety of potentially sensitive demographic determinations.

If their sale of their Hawaii or New England networks didn't make it clear, Verizon's announcement yesterday indicates the company's answer to lower ROI markets is to sell them. Ed Gubbins at Telephony Online crunches the numbers a little further, and with the sale of 4.8 million mostly-rural access lines, Verizon now may eventually reach 80% FiOS coverage on their remaining footprint:Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg says there's no plans to offload any additional markets, though you wonder if additional chops won't be made down the line (upstate NY, particularly blue-collar cities like Binghamton being one possibility). At some point this year or next, Verizon will likely announce the next phase of FiOS deployment, pushing their FiOS past the 18 million home mark and closer to 80% of all homes.

Given new franchise agreements in DC, Philly and NYC, the telco clearly now has room to grow into very dense and profitable markets. The question of course becomes what happens to those 4.8 million homes offloaded to Frontier Communications? Like Fairpoint, it's not entirely clear that Frontier can handle either the new debt or the sudden growth -- and it's highly unlikely that users in those markets will see next-generation upgrades anytime soon.