CenturyLink Brings Gigabit Service to Utah Businesses

By Michael Guta
Contributing Writer

Gigabit speed is now the standard by which operators are being judged when their customers are looking for broadband service. Since Google (News - Alert) announced it was starting a gigabit service, the industry as a whole has been forced to upgrade their infrastructure much faster than they would've liked, but the end result has been positive for consumers, businesses and operators. One of the companies that started delivering gigabit services is CenturyLink (News - Alert), which just announced more than 13,000 small to large business customers in 1,150 multi-tenant unit (MTU) office buildings in Utah will have access to fiber-ready broadband speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps).

For CenturyLink, the process of providing gigabit service across the country has been effective as the company methodically leverages its 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network to deliver broadband, voice, video, data and managed service by carefully selecting each region for opportunities. The company has a global presence with communications, hosting, cloud and IT services, which also includes network and data systems management, Big Data analytics and IT consulting, with more than 55 data centers in operation across North America, Europe and Asia. The international transport network CenturyLink uses covers 300,000-route-miles.

Broadband service is now one of the criteria consumers and businesses consider before making a move to a new location. As the President and CEO of the Economic Development Corporation of Utah, Theresa Foxley put it like this, “Having CenturyLink’s world-class network infrastructure in Utah is instrumental in helping us attract new businesses of all sizes to the state.”

Businesses that exist within multi-tenant unit (MTU) have a much harder time getting the latest technology because the infrastructure is not always deployed during construction. Unless the service provider has fiber routes throughout the area, it becomes that much more difficult.

CenturyLink overcomes this predicament because it owns, maintains and controls seven fiber routes that transit the state of Utah, this according to Jeremy Ferkin, vice president of Utah operations, CenturyLink. This not only gives the company access to more locations, but it can also offer the lowest latency connectivity to meet increasing bandwidth demands from businesses.

 Ferkin adds, “By offering fiber-ready services to multi-tenant unit office buildings across the state of Utah, we can more quickly connect our business customers to the power of the digital world and offer them access to the same blazing-fast gigabit service from CenturyLink that enterprises throughout the country already trust for affordable and scalable business solutions.”

Some of the services these businesses will be able to access include, access to multiple wide-area network connections delivered over fiber, including multiprotocol label switching virtual private network (MPLS-VPN), metro Ethernet and the latest software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) solution.