CenturyLink's fiber march continues in Tennessee with the addition of a 59-mile ring in a growing area southeast of Memphis. The new fiber ring, which is slated to be finished in the fall, will bring faster speeds and more data capacity to the Collierville area of Tennessee. The network expansion will tie in existing CenturyLink fiber routes to create a new metro fiber ring that connects Collierville to the Memphis metro area and Olive Branch, Mississippi.
“Enterprise businesses have a need for speed and capacity to keep up with increasing business demands,” said Chris Clark, CenturyLink's general manager for Tennessee, in a statement. "The network expansion and capital investments coming to Collierville reconfirm CenturyLink’s commitment to be the trusted connection for Tennessee businesses needing this infrastructure to unlock new opportunities presented by transformative technologies.”
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CenturyLink already serves more than 3,000 on-net buildings across Tennessee, and plans to connect an additional 600 buildings this year.
In addition to high-speed internet services, businesses in the Collierville area will also have an improved pathway to access, store and process their data and applications at the network edge with CenturyLink's edge compute services. Putting applications and data at the network edge results in low latency for CenturyLink's customers.
In July, CenturyLink announced it would deploy 4.7 million more miles of fiber across the company's intercity networks in the U.S. and Europe. The first phase of the fiber overbuild was completed in June with more than 50 cities across the U.S. connected with fiber.
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CenturyLink's fiber is also key to the company's effort to move more compute resources to the network edge. In August, CenturyLink announced its blueprint for edge compute services. CenturyLink has booted up more than 106 initial edge compute locations across the U.S. to provide a range of managed services and hybrid cloud solutions to its customers. The edge compute services blend compute, storage and networking capabilities into one package.
CenturyLink's edge compute services include 5 millisecond transport time from its existing locations to the edge, which is ideal for low-latency applications such as 5G, virtual reality, augmented reality, machine learning, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI.)