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.
