CenturyLink aiming for 1 Gbps in 13 new cities

Having begun offering 1 Gbps in Omaha, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas, CenturyLink has announced it’s expanding the service to locations in 13 more cities. Specifically, CenturyLink will bring its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network to hundreds of thousands of residential and business subscribers over the coming year.

In some ways, though, this is a limited offering. In six of the projected cities, 1 Gbps service will only be available to businesses. However in seven more, plus the original three, FTTP will be offered to both business and residential customers.

Shirish Lal, CenturyLink senior vice president, said that many companies talk of 1 gigabit per second service at some point, but, “CenturyLink is delivering these speeds today to thousands of residential and business customers, making us one of the fastest broadband providers in these communities.”

One of the new locations is high-tech center Seattle, where CenturyLink’s Meg Andrews said “this product will be true fiber-to-the-premise/home, not fiber to a box in a neighborhood, then connecting to existing copper wires.”

But Seattle observers are being cautious. Bill Schrier wrote in Crosscut that, “Seattle has been left at the altar of fiber-to-the-home high-speed Internet twice before — first by Google and then by Gigabit Squared, which is now being sued by the City of Seattle over their breakup.”

Speed Matters supports fiber alternatives to the cable monopoly.

CenturyLink Pushes 1-Gig Expansion (Multichannel news, Aug. 5, 2014) 

 Another Seattle Internet hoax? CenturyLink vows real gigabit in Seattle (Crosscut, Aug. 5, 2014)