Verizon (News - Alert) Communications, in reporting its financial results, last week noted that in the second quarter it continued to add FiOS customers, reporting 196,000 net FiOS (News - Alert) Internet and 174,000 net FiOS TV customer additions in the quarter. But a story on The Wall Street Journal’s online site today says that despite these gains, the growth rate for the much-vaunted fiber-to-the-home-based services has slowed significantly from the same quarter in 2009, when Verizon added 300,000 FiOS TV users.

Indeed, the WSJ went as far as to suggest in the first paragraph of the story that: “Verizon Communications may want to tweak the ad slogan for its TV and ultrafast Internet service to ‘This is FIOS. This is pretty small.’”

Ouch!

Verizon, according to its own accounts, says it now has 3.8 million total FiOS Internet customers and 3.2 million total FiOS TV customers.

The company has recently made some bold moves in what seems to be an effort to jumpstart the flagging growth in FiOS subscribership. As recently reported by TMCnet, the company announced it is taking the risk out of signing on for FiOS Internet and television service. If after a month customers decide FiOS isn’t for them, they can cancel with no fees.

As also noted in the story, however, Verizon could stand to lose big if customers don’t stick around, as it reportedly costs the company $1,350 to install FiOS at a new customer’s home.

In any case, Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg last week said:  “Verizon showed solid improvement in operational results in the quarter. In addition, the wireline spinoff to Frontier on July 1 improves our future growth profile.  We see the opportunity to create additional shareholder value with a revenue portfolio that is now more heavily focused on wireless, FiOS and global IP.”