Verizon (News - Alert) announced today that it has plans to expand its fiber-to-the premises (FTTP) network to the communities of Forest Grove, McMinnville and Wilsonville in the Portland, Oregon area.

The telecom will also continue the deployment of its network expansion in the Beaverton, Sherwood and Tualatin areas of Washington County, and the east Multnomah communities of Gresham, Troutdale, Fairview and Wood Village. The move will enable Internet users in these counties to subscribe to broadband services from Verizon.

The telecom's new network expansion will bring broadband services including voice, high-speed Internet and TV, to a reported 59,000 additional homes and small businesses.

“The FTTP project already has had a positive impact on the local economy, creating new jobs,” commented Verizon’s vice president for the Northwest David S. Valdez in a statement. “We’ve employed hundreds of contractors to build the network; and we've hired more than 300 new Verizon employees over the past two years to design the network, install our FiOS broadband and voice services, and provide technical support to our customers.”

Verizon expects to install more than 5 million feet of fiber-optic cabling spanning the Portland metro area by this year's end, bringing to 211,000 the total number of homes and small businesses in the area that will be linked to the new network.

The news follows Verizon’s introduction of Verizon Business Voice Continuity, a suite of new disaster recovery tools now available to federal customers under the U.S. General Services Administration’s Washington Interagency Telecommunications System (WITS) 2001 contract for federal agencies within the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. The new service suite, which is offered in conjunction with TeleContinuity, can aid government agencies in meeting continuity of operations planning (COOP) requirements. If an equipment failure was to occur, natural disaster or building evacuation, the Verizon Business Voice Continuity option provides the capability to reroute calls, therefore maintaining telephone service to any location and device—wired or wireless phones included, as well as desktop or mobile computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

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Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet and Internet Telephony magazine. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit her columnist page.