CenturyLink expands gigabit Internet service to small businesses in Boulder, Fort Collins

Downtown "Old Town" Fort Collins

Downtown “Old Town” Fort Collins (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An official for CenturyLink on Monday said that the company’s decision to begin offering 1-gigabit fiber-optic Internet speeds to a large chunk of businesses in Boulder and Fort Collins was not influenced by those cities’ ongoing exploration into creating their own municipal broadband utilities.

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) began offering such service to small and medium-sized businesses in Denver and Colorado Springs last summer. Previously, only enterprise-sized businesses that could afford the added expense of having such service brought to their buildings, or large office buildings that provided CenturyLink with sufficient density for a positive return on investment, had access to such service from the company.

CenturyLink announced Monday that the company is making its gigabit download and upload speeds available to small and medium-sized businesses in Aurora, Boulder and Fort Collins thanks to a growing network that is helping enable the company to make such service available more broadly for an affordable price.

In November, Boulder voters passed a measure that grants the city the ability to create its own municipal broadband utility in an attempt to make faster service available to residents and businesses. Fort Collins, meanwhile, has money budgeted this year to explore the idea of creating a municipal utility itself. Both cities are following in the footsteps of Longmont, which last summer began building out its municipal broadband service. It will make 1-gigabit service available to all residents and businesses by next year.

Continue Reading

About Mark Milliman

Mark Milliman is a Principal Consultant at Inphotonics Research driving the adoption and assisting local governments to plan, build, operate, and lease access open-access municipal broadband networks. Additionally, he works with entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to increase the value of their intellectual capital through the creation of strategic product plans and execution of innovative marketing strategies. With more than 22 years of experience in the telecommunications industry that began at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Mark has built fiber, cable, and wireless networks around the world to deliver voice, video, and data services. His thorough knowledge of all aspects of service delivery from content creation to the design, operation, and management of the network is utilized by carriers and equipment manufacturers. Mark conceived and developed one of the industry's first multi-service provisioning platform and is multiple patent holder. He is active in the IEEE as a senior member. Mark received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Iowa State University and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.