Originally founded in 1983 as Bell Atlantic Corporation when AT&T was broken up into seven 'Baby Bells', the company became Verizon Communications Inc. in June 2000.

The new company resulted from a merger with GTE, one of the largest mergers in US business history. It is now a global broadband and telecommunications provider with its headquarters in New York City.

Verizon's FIOS internet service was rated the fastest internet in the US in 2010 by PCMAG.com. The service also won the same magazine's Readers Choice award for five consecutive years up to 2010.

The company reckons its service is the fastest because its network is fiber optic right into the home, unlike some providers that use a mixture of fiber optic and coaxial cable. Verizon also maintains it doesn't 'throttle' its service by deliberately slowing it down for heavy users. It further states that it provides consistently fast download speeds rather than using 'boosters' to increase speed at the start of the download, which is then not maintained.

Verizon conducted a fiber optic speed trial in June 2010 where it achieved a near gigabit a second speed. The trial involved an unnamed business customer in Taunton, Massachusetts, with the customer receiving 925 megabits per second from a Verizon central office less than two miles away. Speeds of 800 megabits per second were also recorded over a 400 mile distance and over existing networks.

The company is continuing to expand and improve its network. It spent over $814 million in 2010 in Virginia alone, extending its fiber optic service to more than 1.1 million homes and businesses there by the end of the year. Virginia is seen as a hub for Verizon's global internet operations, although there were an unusually large number of complaints in the state in 2010 from its landline customers.

In February 2011, Time Warner Cable Inc. was forced to withdraw adverts for its fiber optic network after a complaint from Verizon. The National Advertising Review Board Panel ruled that its description of fiber being a 'predominant characteristic' of its products could be misleading.

Earlier that same year, Verizon asked a federal appeals court to overturn a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) order that prevented internet service providers blocking access to certain web content or applications. Verizon's argument is that the FCC has exceeded its authority and the company believes that broadband providers should be able to run their networks without government interference. As far back as 2004, the company's mail servers were not accepting connections from Europe in an attempt to reduce spam email.

Read more on our main Fiber Optic Internet Providers website about this and other internet service providers in California.