While Comcast lobbyists tried their best to slow the encroachment of Verizon FiOS into their hometown of Philadelphia, the Philly city council authorized a citywide franchise back in February (you can read the agreement here (pdf) if you're into that kind of thing). As per the deal, Verizon has around seven years to wire the whole city, though these agreements (as with NYC and DC) often have loopholes that let Verizon extend deadlines or wiggle out of obligations should certain adoption numbers not be met. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, service this week went live in Chestnut Hill, South Philadelphia and North Philadelphia, near Girard College. Additional neighborhoods should come online this year, but Verizon isn't saying which ones. Verizon does keep a PA construction notice (pdf) on their website, but it's quite often outdated.

Given the high costs of deploying fiber to the home, we're starting to see new models emerge whereby if customers really want it, they can share the cost of having it installed (one Norwegian ISP gives a $400 rebate if you dig your own fiber trench). Now Utopia, the nation's largest municipal fiber deployment, is testing a new model whereby communities who want the fiber deployed can share the cost of installation. As more Utah cities look to connect to Utopia but debate how they should pay for it, Brigham City has decided that if users want fiber they can pay for it themselves. 1,600 local residents have already ponied up $3,000 a piece, helping the city install a $5.5 million network while the city itself only puts up about $700,000 of the required cost.

In 2007, UK telco British Telecom called running fiber to the home "premature," instead opting to milk copper for a little longer. In 2008, they announced a widely lauded plan to invest in "fiber" (to the node), though the specifics weren't particularly impressive when you looked a little closer, and the "fiber to the press release" announcement was more about getting a regulatory back rub from the British Government. According to British Telecom's CEO, DSL is like driving a Ford and really -- who isn't perfectly happy driving a Ford?

British Telecom has shown all the telltale signs of the spoiled monopoly broadband providers you're familiar with, from whining when people actually use their product, to throttling 8Mbps connections to 896kbps without bothering to tell anyone. Like most incumbents with investors, they'd prefer to pocket significant profits rather than invest that money back into the network -- even if the move would keep them relevant for decades.

As cable companies have been trying to compete with FiOS and municipal fiber builds, one of their favorite tactics has been advertisements that intentionally distort the difference between core and last-mile fiber. Marketing folk assume that since the public is probably too stupid to understand the difference, they can take some of the shine off of fiber to the home by pretending all fiber is created equal.

Time Warner Cable has taken the lead on this front, though the tactic is used by most every major cable operator, including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Charter. Qwest is of course guilty of this as well, advertising their copper-based ADSL2 and VDSL services as "Qwest Fiber Optic Internet Service."

By and large, carriers only get wrist slaps for this false advertising.

Earlier this week we noted how Verizon's quarterly subscriber additions for their fiber to the home FiOS service were lower than anticipated. The company added 191,000 new FiOS subs on the quarter, down from the 300,000 added in the second quarter. According to Verizon, they're blaming the lower additions on "marketing campaigns that didn't work" -- though who knows which efforts failed, given Verizon does everything to promote FiOS from throwing local ice cream parties to ads taking jabs at the cable man.

As Verizon reaches the end of their initial $23 billion deployment wave, it's becoming pretty clear the company is going to slow new deployments and spend more money on marketing to existing deployment regions.