Verizon Fios has introduced a new 5Gbps home internet plan, doubling the speed of its previous fastest tier and undercutting AT&T's equivalent offering by $30 per month. The plan is live on Verizon's product pages and available for order in select locations as of July 17, 2026. Engadget

Pricing works on a two-track model. The standard rate is $105 per month. New customers switching from another provider can get the plan for $90 per month with a five-year price lock. Existing Verizon Fios customers upgrading to the 5Gbps tier receive a three-year price lock. Verizon charges a general $99 setup fee, and enrollment requires credit approval. Verizon

For comparison, AT&T's 5Gbps plan runs $135 per month, or $95 per month for the first 12 months for new customers. Verizon's pricing and longer lock periods put the plan in direct competition with AT&T in markets where both providers offer fiber. Engadget

At the wire, 5Gbps translates to roughly 625MB/s of theoretical throughput — fast enough to download a full Blu-ray movie in about 20 seconds. Verizon's own network documentation specifies average wired speeds between 4.5 and 5.3 Gbps for the tier in both directions, confirming symmetric upload and download on a passive optical network (PON) architecture. A PON is a fiber setup where a single fiber line serves multiple households by splitting the signal, and Verizon's infrastructure supports equal speeds whether you're downloading or uploading. Verizon

The previous fastest Verizon Fios plan was 2Gbps. The new tier sits at the top of a five-step ladder that ranges from 300 Mbps to 5 Gbps. Engadget Verizon

Availability is limited to "select locations" rather than nationwide. This is consistent with how fiber providers stage high-tier rollouts: the underlying network infrastructure must be set up with enough capacity to deliver the higher speeds to each household on the line. Verizon has not specified which markets are eligible.

The broader context here is a competitive fiber market where the cost of pushing higher speeds over already-deployed fiber is modest compared to the value of acquiring and keeping customers. Verizon's pricing structure rewards switching more generously than loyalty: a new customer pays $90 locked for five years, while an existing customer gets $105 locked for three. The implicit message is that Verizon views the plan as a customer-acquisition tool first and an upgrade incentive second.

Against AT&T's $135 list price, Verizon's $105 standard rate creates a meaningful gap. AT&T's promotional $95-for-12-months offer narrows that for new customers, but the five-year price lock on Verizon's $90 switcher rate is structurally harder to match, since it commits Verizon to a fixed revenue per subscriber over a longer period than AT&T's 12-month promotional window. Whether that trade-off pays off depends on how many customers leave each month and what it costs to acquire new ones in the specific markets where both providers operate.

For the technology enthusiasts who represent the likely early adopters of a 5Gbps residential tier, the practical question is whether their home network hardware can actually use the full speed. A single 10-gigabit Ethernet port can handle it; most consumer-grade Wi-Fi 6 routers and mesh systems cannot. Wi-Fi 7 routers with multi-link operation (the ability to use multiple frequency bands simultaneously) and 320MHz channel support can approach wired speeds in optimal conditions, but real-world performance with multiple devices connected will stay below the full line rate. The plan is most useful in households running multiple simultaneous high-bandwidth sessions, backing up large files to the cloud, or running a home server with 10-gigabit switching.

Worth flagging is the three-year versus five-year lock disparity for existing customers. In an industry where promotional pricing typically favors new sign-ups over retention, the structure is unremarkable on its face. But it does mean that a current Fios subscriber evaluating the upgrade faces a $15/month premium over a switcher and a shorter rate guarantee, which could nudge some existing customers toward a deliberate churn cycle: cancel, wait, and re-sign to capture the better terms. Whether Verizon has built in eligibility checks to prevent that is not stated in the available materials.

The plan's "select locations" caveat limits its near-term impact. Multi-gigabit residential fiber is still a market-by-market proposition in the United States, constrained by where providers have run fiber deep enough into neighborhoods to support the tier. Verizon's Fios footprint is concentrated in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and the 5Gbps tier will live or die on whether that footprint overlaps with the households that want it.

What this enables is straightforward. For households that already run 10-gigabit wired networks or are planning to, a symmetric 5Gbps fiber connection at $105 removes the internet bottleneck that has persisted even as local network speeds have climbed. Multi-gigabit internet has been available in pockets for several years; what is changing is the pricing pressure that pushes it toward a viable residential proposition rather than a premium niche. More competition at this tier will eventually expand availability and compress pricing further. That is a slow process, but the direction is the right one.