Don’t go storming in to Comcast’s service center in Northeast to return your DVRs and modems just yet, but you may be able to free yourself from the cable provider’s ubiquitous grip soon enough.

The Examiner is reporting today that the D.C. Office of Cable Television and Verizon have reached an initial agreement to bring the provider’s fiber optic network, FiOS, to the District. The agreement, while not yet a done deal, would mean that a handful of residents (those in buildings pre-wired for the service) could have access to Verizon’s all-in-one service by early 2009, marking the first new competitor to enter the District’s market since RCN started operating in 2005. The rest of us will have to wait longer for the company to replace existing copper lines with fiber optic cable — a process which will take at least a couple of years to complete.

Comcast’s quasi-monopolistic hold on the District’s cable market is legendary, spawning legions of irate customers (bandwidth limits and refusing to air Nats games are but a small sample of the daily struggles many of us have had with the cable giant). And though not a District resident, a 75-year-old Manassas woman did to a Comcast office late last year what so many of us dream about (it involved a hammer) every time we deal with their customer service or try to decipher how our cable rates jumped 50 percent in a month.

News of a tentative FiOS agreement comes as a major victory to the people behind Connect-DC.org, a campaign to convince Verizon to bring FiOS to the District that saw Metrobuses plastered with messages like, “Verizon’s bringing high speed Internet to suburbs. Not D.C. Tell Verizon to stop disrespecting D.C. We need FiOS now.”

The agreement still needs to be reviewed by the Office of the Attorney General and be approved by the D.C. Council, but if any of them are Comcast subscribers, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Council members rush back from their summer recess to get this done as quickly as possible.