On Tuesday we reported that Cablevision's Optimum Online was now offering the fastest connection speed in the country. For $90 a month you get 101 Mbps down and 15 up, which is half the price and twice the downloading speed of Verizon's best plan ($150 for 50/20).

Verizon couldn't stand being upstaged by some young pups from New York, so they lashed out publically at Cablevision through the Internet. First Verizon claimed that Optimum's 101 Mbps speed was nothing more than a 'parlor' trick that could only work in small areas.

The Verizon spokesperson also stated that Verizon was capable of matching those speeds if it wanted to, but that there was no demand for the speed. This is a patently ridiculous claim; people will never be satisfied with the speed of their ISP. Have you ever gotten angry at your Internet connection for being too fast?

A lot of the claims Verizon made in its letter were somewhat nonsensical. One of their chief concerns was, 'What happens when a customer with that speed hits the much slower Internet?', which is a question that makes so little sense that I'm not quite sure what to say about it. It's true that your downloading speed is limited by the speed of the servers on the other end of the transfer, but that doesn't mean that your connection will be 'too fast' for the Internet.

Yes, your 101 Mbps connection won't really be able to download things noticeably faster than FIOS's 50 Mbps, but it WILL let you download more things at a time without losing speed. Likewise, Verizon's claims that a single user downloading at 101 Mbps will 'bog down' his entire neighborhood are laughable.

Verizon, listen up a moment; FIOS is fantastic, but it costs too much, and you've spent too long resting on your laurels anyway. If you really want your 'fastest ISP' title back, get off your butts and give us all Optimum-speed connections for a budget price. That's how you win these market wars, not by doing a poor job of slandering your competition.