CenturyLink lights 1 Gbps FTTP services for over 4K businesses in Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota

CenturyLink is continuing with its fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) 1 Gbps drive in the Midwest, equipping 484 multitenant unit (MTU) office buildings with service in various cities in Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

In all, the service will be available to a mix of 4,318 small to large businesses in these three states.

Eligible business customers that reside in the path of the fiber will be able to bundle 1 Gbps with VoIP, cloud-based services like Microsoft Office 365 and other managed IT solutions.

RELATED: CenturyLink says latest FTTP build will accelerate business service installation

CenturyLink will offer 1 Gbps service to thousands of additional businesses in fiber-ready services in several cities, but the largest impact will be in seven cities in the three states.

In Nebraska, the build will address Omaha, Papillion, and Grand Island. Over in South Dakota and North Dakota, CenturyLink will make the service available to businesses in Sioux Falls, Rapid City, Fargo and Bismarck.

Given the density of the city, the largest impact will be in Omaha, where the service will be available to 2,380 businesses, followed by 400 businesses in Sioux Falls and 302 sites in Fargo, for example.

Any business that resides in buildings in these locations will also be able to get access to additional services such as MPLS-VPN, metro Ethernet and its software-defined wide area network solution.

This latest FTTP drive is part of a broader initiative by the telco to expand 1 Gbps services for business customers in 16 cities, which it announced in August 2014.

CenturyLink told FierceTelecom in a previous interview that by extending fiber to more locations, the telco put itself in a position to pursue new fiber service deals with businesses in other buildings where it does not have fiber yet.

Vernon Irvin, SVP of sales and marketing for CenturyLink’s Enterprise Business Sales unit, said that “we have the ability to be able to within 500 feet of that multitenant unit to build quickly to expand into other buildings.”

When CenturyLink completes its acquisition of Level 3 next year, the service provider will immediately expand its near-net and on-net fiber reach, increasing its on-net building reach by nearly 75% to approximately 75,000, including 10,000 buildings in EMEA and Latin America.

CenturyLink will also gain an additional 200,000 route miles of fiber, including 64,000 route miles in 350 metropolitan areas. This would enable the telco to have more opportunities to extend its 1 Gbps service to an even greater number of locations that might have not been in its original plans.