Verizon FiOS has begun offering services to customers in Boston, Massachusetts, and services should be available to 25,000 homes and businesses in the city by the end of the year.

Verizon mostly stopped expanding FiOS fiber-to-the-home service in 2010 and has since then focused on completing existing builds instead of moving into new cities. But the company changed course in April this year when it said it would finally do a large fiber buildout in Boston, replacing the copper lines used to deliver phone, Internet, and TV service. The company has said it's also talking to other cities about possible fiber rollouts.

Residents of a few Boston neighborhoods are about to see the first fruits of that project.

"Verizon is ready to schedule installs for FiOS as soon as today, based on availability," the company told Ars. The service can be installed now in Dorchester, Roslindale, and West Roxbury, and it will come to Roxbury’s Dudley Square Innovation District later this month. "Expansion will continue street-by-street in Dorchester, Roslindale, Roxbury and West Roxbury in 2017," Verizon said.

Boston has issued a cable TV license to Verizon covering just those neighborhoods, but "the license anticipates future expansion of the service area to additional neighborhoods," the city said in an announcement yesterday.

A joint announcement from Verizon and Boston city officials previously said the project would cost $300 million, take six years, and replace Verizon's "copper-based infrastructure with a state-of-the-art fiber-optic network platform across the city."

But how many residents in Boston will get the opportunity to purchase FiOS service remains an open question. The company's license with the city says Verizon may avoid installations in Boston when it is "commercially impracticable," though this exception does not apply to public housing for low-income residents. It's also not clear where Verizon will build after it finishes wiring up the currently planned neighborhoods. We've asked Verizon for an estimate of how many Boston homes will get fiber and will provide an update if we get one.

UPDATE: Verizon told Ars today that it "plans to offer FiOS across the city over the next 6 years."

Government officials in various cities have criticized Verizon for not serving all residents, particularly in low-income areas. In one of the most prominent cases, a city-wide buildout in New York City did not end up reaching all residents, and NYC officials have been fighting Verizon over the matter.

Verizon’s wireless future

Verizon's Boston project isn't just about fiber-to-the-home; it's also supposed to improve mobile service. "This partnership will also improve wireless services in Boston by enabling Verizon to attach wireless equipment to city street lights and utility poles, helping residents get fast, reliable mobile service," Boston's announcement in April said.

But Verizon's wireless ambitions extend beyond mobile connections. In the future, Verizon wants to use wireless technology to deliver home Internet and TV service. In this scenario, Verizon would bring fiber close to homes, but instead of connecting a wire to each house (known as a "drop"), it would make the final connection with a wireless link.

Telecom analyst and longtime Verizon critic Bruce Kushnick recently claimed the Boston fiber deployment is "vaporware" and pointed to statements from Verizon that position wireless as a preferred alternative to fiber.

"If you think about 5G, you put the fiber down the road, which is what we’re doing in Boston," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said at a recent Goldman Sachs conference. "Then all of the labor and the expense of drilling up your driveway connecting the [optical network terminal, or ONT] to your house and all the labor involved with that, all that goes away, because now I can deliver a beam... into a window with a credit card-size receptor on it that delivers it to a wireless router, and there’s really no labor involved and there’s no real hardware other than the router and the credit card. So the cost benefit of this is pretty substantial—at least, we believe it is."

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam made similar statements during an investor call in July. "About half of our cost to deploy FiOS is in the home today and the next biggest thing outside the home is the drop," McAdam said. Verizon can cut costs substantially by "losing the wiring in the house and losing the drop," he said.

To that end, Verizon is planning to test a wireless video service for homes. Based on the not-yet-finished 5G standard, the service will be in several small towns by the end of March, and it will be free to the homes in the beta testing areas while Verizon evaluates the technology to prepare a wider rollout, McAdam said at an investor conference this week, according to an article in Fortune. This is separate from the Boston fiber deployment.

“We won’t be charging for the service [at first], but we will be learning from it and figuring out the distance between the transmitter and the receiver in a 5G environment,” McAdam said.

Boston could be a logical place for Verizon to test the wireless home service in the future, raising the possibility that some or many Boston homes would be offered wireless links instead of fiber-to-the-premises. But at least for now, the deployment in Boston relies on complete fiber-to-the-home installations, as the company's license from the city speaks of the traditional wire drops to homes and fiber all the way to customer premises. Verizon said it has placed 160 miles of fiber throughout Boston and "performed hundreds of thousands of fiber optic splices to connect distribution lines and to prepare for eventually connecting fiber directly to homes and businesses that order FiOS."