Google Fiber takes on CenturyLink, Comcast in Salt Lake City with 1 Gbps service

Google Fiber (NASDAQ: GOOG) is extending is presence in Utah by naming Salt Lake City as the next city where it will deliver its 1 Gbps-capable fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service, challenging the trio of incumbent players AT&T (NYSE: T), CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) and Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA).

This is the second Utah-based city where Google Fiber now provides service.

The service provider entered Utah when it purchased the iProvo network in 2013. Not long after it entered the Provo market, cable competitor Comcast responded with a competitively priced 250/50 Mbps tier for $70 a month.

It will be interesting to see how Google Fiber's competitors will respond in Salt Lake City. AT&T and CenturyLink currently offer DSL-based broadband with speeds between 10-25 Mbps, while Comcast offers 100 Mbps and beyond over its existing HFC-based network.

CenturyLink will eventually pose a bigger competitive challenge to Google Fiber on the residential side of the Salt Lake City market, which is one of the cities on its broader plan to bring 1 Gbps service to a mix of residential and in 16 cities. Today, it offers 1 Gbps fiber-to the-premises (FTTP) services to local small and medium-sized businesses in Salt Lake City that reside in multi-tenant unit (MTU) office buildings.

Salt Lake City joins four other metro areas, including Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham that Google Fiber says are in the design phase of building its fiber network.

"Over the coming months, we'll work closely with these cities to map out just where to lay our fiber-optic cables," wrote Devin Baer, associate city manager for Google Fiber, Salt Lake City, in a blog post.

What about some of the other proposed cities Google Fiber has proposed?

Google Fiber said that it is "still working with city leaders across four additional metro areas--Phoenix, Portland, San Antonio and San Jose--and hope to have updates on these potential Fiber cities later this year."

For more:
- see this blog post

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