Verizon says it has tested 10Gbps broadband service with a residential customer in Massachusetts, using new technology that will let its FiOS fiber-to-the-premises network scale up to 80Gbps "as the market demands."

FiOS residential speeds go up to 500Mbps downstream and upstream today. Verizon's fiber network will eventually get a huge upgrade with NG-PON2 (next generation passive optical network) equipment. Field testing of NG-PON2 equipment from Cisco and PT Inovação "was completed recently from Verizon’s central office in Framingham, Mass., to a FiOS customer’s home three miles away as well as to a nearby business location. This followed extensive testing in Verizon’s laboratories in Waltham, Mass.," Verizon said in its announcement yesterday.

With NG-PON2, providers can boost capacity "by simply adding new colors of light onto the existing fiber, each augmenting the capacity by up to 10Gbps," Verizon said. The announcement continued:

The trial, according to Vincent O’Byrne, Ph.D., director of access technology for Verizon, consisted of a new optical line terminal (OLT) installed in the Verizon central office, generating four wavelengths, or colors of light, each capable of operating at 10G/2.5G [10Gbps download and 2.5Gbps upload]. Later versions are envisioned to support the same download and upload speeds of 10G/10G per color. One test transmitted the NG-PON2 signals over a fiber serving live GPON customers proving that the network can simultaneously deliver GPON and NG-PON2 on the same fiber. The field trial also validated an important service reliability feature of NG-PON2. In this test, a fault in the central office equipment was simulated and the customer’s ONT autonomously tuned to another wavelength, restoring its own 10G service in seconds. This new feature of NG-PON2 has critical implications for improved customer reliability and performance.

There's no word yet on when faster service will be available to customers, but Verizon said it will issue a request for proposals later this year to buy NG-PON2 hardware and software. Verizon noted that the multi-gigabit speeds will initially be most attractive to business customers but said, "[t]hat’s expected to change as the adoption of 4K video content and the explosion of the Internet of Things, with an estimated 25 billion Internet-connected devices expected by 2020, will create demand for higher symmetrical speeds and lower latency for consumers as well."

Today, a two-hour high-definition movie takes about 17 minutes to download using Verizon's popular 75Mbps service, but it takes only eight seconds with 10Gbps, FiOS engineer Shweta Jain said in a video that accompanied the announcement. Doctors would be able to download CT cardiac exams in about 30 seconds. For business customers, having multiple channels on the same fiber will dramatically improve reliability, she said: