Following a set of initial deployments in Omaha, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, CenturyLink has followed up with the launch of fiber-fed, 1 Gbps services to “select locations” in an additional 13 cities where the telco tangles with incumbent MSOs such as Cox Communications, Mediacom Communications, Bright House Networks and Comcast.
CenturyLink is offering 1-Gig to residential and business services to ten of those markets, and only to business customers in the remaining six. While “thousands” of customers have access to those speeds now, CenturyLink will expand access its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to “hundreds of thousands” of residential and business customers within the next 12 months.
CenturyLink has set up a Web site that tells prospective customers if 1-Gig speeds are available to them. They can also sign up to receive alerts when those speeds do become available.
Here’s a rundown of CenturyLink’s 1-Gig expansion and the primary incumbent cable operator in each market:
Residential and Business:
-Columbia, Mo. (Mediacom Communications)
-Denver (Comcast)
-Jefferson City, Mo. (Mediacom)
-Las Vegas (Cox)
-Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn. (Comcast)
-Omaha, Neb. (Cox)
-Orlando, Fla. (Bright House Networks)
-Portland, Ore. (Comcast)
-Salt Lake City, Utah (Comcast)
-Seattle (Comcast)
Business:
-Albuquerque, N.M. (Comcast)
-Colorado Springs, Colo. (Comcast)
-Phoenix (Cox)
-Sioux Falls, S.D. (Midcontinent Communications)
-Spokane, Wash. (Comcast)
-Tucson, Ariz. (Cox and Comcast.
CenturyLink said it is moving ahead with those deployments now while other service providers explore plans to offer 1-Gig services to additional markets, seemingly a veiled jab at providers such as Google Fiber, AT&T and Cox Communications.
Among that group, Cox plans to begin market-wide deployment of 1-Gig speeds by the end of 2016, but will start in the fourth quarter of this year by targeting new residential construction projects and new and existing neighborhoods in three CenturyLink markets -- Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha. Cox has also started to unleash upgrades that double the downstream capabilities of its two most popular high-speed Internet tiers.
“While some providers talk about bringing broadband speeds of 1 gigabit per second to their customers in the future, CenturyLink is delivering these speeds today to thousands of residential and business customers, making us one of the fastest broadband providers in these communities,” said Shirish Lal, CenturyLink senior vice president of marketing, in a statement. “We are providing these cities a reliable network with ultra-fast broadband speeds that help create a foundation for a strong community, attract new businesses and drive economic growth.”
