Verizon has begun an ambitious rollout of fiber optics to businesses and residences with the deployment of 440,000 feet of cabling in suburban Dallas.

The carrier this week announced that it is about halfway through the build-out of a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to every home and business in Keller, Texas, a city of 25,000. When completed, Verizon will string 1.2 million feet of fiber through Keller.

FTTP is a passive optical networking (PON) project undertaken by Verizon, SBC and BellSouth to provision high-speed voice, video and data services to homes and businesses over fiber. For example, Verizon says some of the new broadband access products to be offered via FTTP will feature download speeds of 5M bit/sec, 15M bit/sec and 30M bit/sec, compared to 1M bit/sec and 4M bit/sec for DSL and cable.

Verizon expects to begin marketing these and other FTTP-based products in Keller, and elsewhere in Texas and in other states later this year. The carrier will announce these locations at that time.

Verizon reiterated plans to pass about 1 million homes in nine states with FTTP by the end of the year. Earlier this year, analysts stated expectations that Verizon would fall short of that goal by about 200,000 to 300,000 homes, reportedly due to problems with initial equipment shipments from vendor AFC.

Even though testing of the AFC gear is ongoing, Verizon says everything is on schedule. "The fact of the matter is, it works," the Verizon spokesman said of the AFC equipment.

Keller is the first of Verizon's two FTTP "first office applications" (FOA) scheduled for the May/June timeframe. Verizon has not yet announced the second FOA.

The fiber in Keller has been strung along aerial cables and in underground conduits, and buried in the ground throughout the suburb's neighborhoods. It costs Verizon about $1,000 to $1,500 per home to FTTP-enable Keller, the spokesman said.

He would not say how much the FTTP-based broadband access services will cost when they are rolled out later this year but promised that they will be "competitive."

As for Verizon's copper-based DSL broadband service, the carrier says that will continue to be its primary broadband Internet access product as FTTP deployment ramps up. Verizon just announced an increase in speed for its DSL offering and said it continues to expand the availability of the service even though FTTP will eventually replace copper-based local loops and services.