CenturyLink extends 1 Gbps to over 14,000 business MTUs

CenturyLink has connected a total of 14,400 multi-tenant units with 1 Gbps services in over 600 cities, deepening its business fiber to the premises (FTTP) footprint to keep growing competitors like Comcast and Charter at bay.

As part of this latest build out, CenturyLink will delivers its gigabit service to over 100,000 small to large businesses in MTUs (multi-tenant units) with symmetrical speeds, as well as offer its VoIP and managed IT solutions.

Some of the cities that will benefit from this latest fiber build are Phoenix, Denver, Seattle, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Colorado Springs, and Minneapolis/Saint Paul.

CenturyLink’s latest fiber build highlights the importance of available fiber in order to enable next-gen services such as MPLS-VPN, metro Ethernet and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) in business buildings. A fiber-enabled broadband connection can improve the performance of business software applications and IT operations, especially cloud-based functions like data storage and backup.

One of the key services that CenturyLink will push aggressively with this latest build is Microsoft 365, a managed service that offers small and large businesses managed office, internet, voice and business applications, including Microsoft Office 365.

Vertical Systems Group revealed in its recent fiber report released this April that the U.S. fiber gap continued to narrow in 2015 as business fiber penetration in commercial buildings grew to 46.2 percent. This is up from 42.5 percent in 2015 and 39.3 percent in 2014 of U.S. buildings in 2013.

"Fiber penetration increased in 2015 as network operators targeted greenfield metro areas and mid-size multi-tenant buildings for new installations," said Rosemary Cochran, principal at VSG.

For more:
- see the release

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