We guessed correctly. We attended a Verizon conference call today where the company took the wraps off their new symmetrical 20Mbps tier. We were the first to report on the existence of the new tier last week, after NYC trial participants spotted it in the wild. According to Verizon, the company has launched the 20Mbps symmetrical service in the NY/NJ/CT markets, with additional market launches on the horizon.

The service starts around $64.99 a month, depending on bundle and contract options. According to the company's press release, the new tier comes with 1GB of online storage. Residential symmetrical fiber isn't exactly a groundbreaking concept, but Verizon is the first major ISP with plans of national deployment.

Many FTTH providers also cap their symmetrical service, and whether the 20/20 tier would be capped was the first question fired at Verizon on the conference call.

"We don't impose caps upon our subscribers," insisted Susan Retta, Vice President of broadband solutions for Verizon. "We expect customers who order this 20/20 service will want to use it frequently, and we intend to give them the bandwidth that they ordered and they expect."

Paul Tassinari, Verizon VP of National Engineering, insists the new tier highlights the "future proof" nature of the FiOS network, given that very little was done on the networking end to accommodate the faster upstream speeds. "We've heard our customers," he says. "They want to receive data as fast as they send it."

We don't impose caps upon our subscribers -Susan Retta, Verizon VP of broadband solutions

Tassinari also touched on the company's planned GPON upgrades, which could potentially allow Verizon to offer speeds up to 400Mbps. We know the company is currently testing a 100Mbps tier among Verizon employees, but Tassinari says the GPON upgrades will start hitting customers before the year's end. "We're going to quadruple our downstream speeds and increase our upstream by over eight times," he says.

Offering symmetrical service will be a real marketing kick in the teeth for cable, whose slow upstream offerings frequently annoy our regular users.

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