Craving HD IPTV? It could be closer than you think

The Telecommunications Industry Association and the Fiber to the Home Council have released the results of a study proclaiming that over a million customers now have fiber service, and can get HDTV over those links. The industry also passes over six million homes and businesses, which means that those potential customers could hook up if they wanted. The interesting part is that this is a 50 percent increase since only March when the fiber lines only passed four million, so they've been doing some serious digging to lay all that fiber (or at least from the street to the homes, the main trunks may have already been laid long before then)

Nevertheless, all this rides on your local provider actually laying those lines and offering the service, here in the Fort Worth, Texas area I have SBC AT&T and they offer nothing but plain old medium-speed ADSL. Yet I have coworkers who live in areas serviced by Verizon and get speeds on their FIOS that make me want to cry (and move!) So, hopefully you're in a location where your local provider has laid down the lines and is just saving up the thousand bucks to offer you fiber, and not like me, stuck in an area where your provider apparently doesn't care about signing up new business.