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CenturyLink Broadens Gigabit Availability in Seattle

After initially being criticized for overhyping its availability, CenturyLink now says they're offering gigabit service to 100,000 Seattle locations ahead of schedule. CenturyLink originally stated that they'd hoped to reach this milestone by the end of 2015. Like many companies, CenturyLink is engaged in very selective deployment of gigabit services, usually with an eye on wealthier communities or high-end developments.

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These limited deployments are usually then heavily advertised to give the impression of a broader deployment that actually might exist (aka "fiber to the press release").

In CenturyLink's case, the heavy advertising for a service many couldn't get resulted in a lot of annoyed Seattelites unable to order the service they'd been advertised. We're going to be seeing a lot more of this as companies increasingly hype what are, in full context, quite limited, cherry picked deployments.

If you are one of the 100,000 Seattle residents (out of the city's 3.6 million residents) able to get service, CenturyLink's offering gigabit connectivity for $80 if bundled with voice and television service. If you aren't, the city continues to toy with the idea of building its own gigabit network after a decade of being disappointed with the pace of incumbent broadband upgrades.

Most recommended from 24 comments



clhello
@embarqhsd.net

4 recommendations

clhello

Anon

very exhaust much lag

And I continue to sit on my bandwidth exhausted dslam for almost 2 years now. zzzz centurylink please.

mr_slick
join:2003-05-22
Lynnwood, WA

4 recommendations

mr_slick

Member

statistics...

all depend on what is really being measured... are these 100K locations IN Seattle? (which has a population of ~700K) or is it as Karl suggests with his 3.6 million figure actually the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett-Bellevue metro area? This is a big distinction. For instance I live in the latter and am not serviced by CL, but rather have Frontier FIOS (old Verizon). A large chunk of this area is Frontier, but some are still stuck on DSL.