It looks like DSL Extreme is the first major ISP to strike a deal to resell Verizon FiOS service, the company today announcing the launch of "Fiber Extreme" service. According to the DSL Extreme press release, the company is now offering customers FTTH speeds up to 50Mbps. The press release doesn't mention Verizon or FiOS anywhere, though a DSL Extreme tech has been providing additional information in our DSL Extreme forum.

Fiber Extreme is offered with DHCP for residential and either DHCP or Static IPs for business clients. Inbound port 80 is blocked on residential and dynamic IP business accounts, but port 80 is opened on business accounts with static IPs. The company says they're offering free setup and a free router lease for their $39.95 10Mbps/2Mbps tier with a one year contract.

If you compare DSL Extreme and FiOS prices you'll note that DSL Extreme is selling the 50Mbps tier for substantially less than Verizon does ($99 versus $145). Based on our conversations with other ISPs trying to strike similar deals with Verizon, DSL Extreme is likely working with some pretty narrow profit margins under this deal.

Perhaps its time for DSL Extreme to change their name to something a little less, oh, coppery?

Over the weekend, we noted that a growing number of CLEC technicians were complaining that Qwest's new FTTN/ADSL2+ upgrades were causing interference for some customers who remained on vanilla DSL (CLEC Or Qwest). According to the technicians, instead of fixing the problem, Qwest has been using the technical issue in order to upsell customers to new FTTN service. Since CLECs can't share Qwest's new infrastructure, CLECs are suggesting this is one way that Qwest could finally kill off pesky Qwest competition once and for all.

"I can confirm that this is a huge issue in the Denver area," says a CLEC tech in our forums.

We're hearing from several sources over the past few days that AT&T is raising the wholesale loop charges for ISPs who do business with them. It looks like the changes should officially start on May 16, 2008, but you may start seeing your independent ISP raising DSL prices before then if they work with AT&T (some may be noticing the price hikes already). Small ISPs, for whom it's already hard enough to do business, aren't pleased.

"The interesting thing is that even if you sold DSL service through AT&Ts "Term Pricing Plan" -- your rates are still going up," a high-level executive at one ISP tells us.