Touting the fastest mass-market offering in the U.S., Verizon FiOS has launched a broadband product with speeds of 150-megabits-per-second (Mbps) downstream and 35 Mbps upstream.

Touting the fastest mass-market offering in the U.S., Verizon FiOS has launched a broadband product with speeds of 150 megabits per second downstream and 35 Mbps upstream.

Supported by a fiber-optic network, the 150/35 Mbps FiOS tier starts at $194.99 a month when purchased with a one-year service agreement and Verizon wireline voice service. It is available today for Verizon FiOS residential customers and for business customers in December.

"The new 150/35 Mbps FiOS Internet offer establishes a new benchmark for high-speed Internet in America, and paves the way for a flurry of emerging bandwidth-intensive applications to reach mainstream status," Eric Bruno, Verizon vice president of product management, said in a statement.

Verizon's 150 Mbps downstream speed, fast enough to download a 1GB file in roughly a minute, is three times faster than Time Warner's fastest Internet offering and 50 percent faster than Comcast and Cablevision, Verizon said.

Its 35 Mbps upstream speed is 30 percent faster than Cablevision and Comcast and seven times faster than Time Warner. Upstream speed increasingly important as consumers share larger files of videos, photos and data through social-networking sites and e-mail, the company said.

Comcast previously claimed the fastest ISP title with downstream/upstream speeds of 105/15 Mbps through its Extreme 105 product, narrowly edging out Cablevision's Optimum Online Ultra service with downstream/upstream speeds of 101/15 Mbps.

Time Warner's Cable Wideband Internet boasts downstream/upstream speeds of 50/5 Mbps.

In June, PCMag ranked Verizon FiOS as the .

Digital Society analyst George Ou said the quoted speeds may actually be an understatement. "[They] can actually back it up with an all fiber network that has a lot more headroom to grow," Ou blogged. "That might be an understatement since FiOS uses Fiber to the Home (FTTH) technology that has already been tested at 10 Gbps which is shared between a maximum of 32 homes."

In August, Verizon successfully completed a delivering nearly a gigabit per second of data. Last month, the company crossed another milestone, delivering 10 Gbps through an trial run of advanced XG-PON2 technology.