Fastest Internet Service to Come to Some Local Neighborhoods

This week, Verizon announced that certain Seal Beach and Los Alamitos neighborhoods now have access to what the company touts as the fastest Internet service on the market.

An enduring mystery since I began covering Seal Beach and Los Alamitos has been the seemingly random pattern of local neighborhoods eligible for Verizon’s FiOS TV/Internet service. For months, readers have been asking me to find out where and why certain neighborhoods get FiOS while others don’t.

For a while, some businesses on Main Street could get it, but homes 50 yards away on 10th Street were ineligible. In Los Alamitos, some blocks got it while the next block over didn’t. However, a lot of coverage has been added in the last year, and most of both cities are covered for FiOS.

Seal Beach FiOS is network deployed, which means some residents are still going to be frustrated because not every single home in the neighborhood will get FiOS service. Neighborhoods that do have the network include the Old Town, Bridgeport, Marina Hill/Hellman Ranch, Leisure World, Surfside and Old Ranch neighborhoods.

In Los Alamitos, the network was developed under a local franchise agreement, which means that the whole city gets the service except for condos and apartments who declined to have the infrastructure installed.

The new FiOS Internet tiers containing the highest speeds are named FiOS Quantum and feature download/upload speeds of 50/25, 75/35, 150/65 and 300/65 megabits per second (Mbps). Three of those speeds—75/35, 150/65 and 300/65—are twice as fast as those previously offered, according to Verizon.

Existing FiOS customers are eligible to upgrade to the faster speeds anytime, with no upgrade fee. However, most will pay $10 to $15 more per month to double or triple their Internet speed, according to a Verizon spokesman.