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Telecommunications services and cloud infrastructure provider CenturyLink announced the availability of 1G-bps fiber speeds to more than 115,000 additional U.S. business locations and in five additional states.
The network expansion means the company’s symmetrical gigabit fiber service now reaches nearly 490,000 small to medium-size business (SMB) locations in 17 states with the availability of IT solutions including IP networking, voice over IP (VoIP) and cloud capabilities.
CenturyLink is launching service to SMB customers in parts of Iowa, Idaho, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin and expanding its availability in nine of the 12 states where CenturyLink initially deployed gigabit fiber for business customers in 16 cities, which it announced in August of last year.
The nine states include Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington, and the company also provides 1G-bps speeds in parts of Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota.
In addition to business 1G-bps service, CenturyLink offers 1G-bps speeds to residential customers in 11 cities.
For the first time, CenturyLink has extended its capabilities all the way down to the customer’s desktop, offering cloud-based business applications such as Microsoft Office 365, the cloud-based version of Microsoft’s popular Office application suite.
CenturyLink uses Fiber-to-the-Premises (FTTP) technology to provide speeds of up to 1G bps to businesses located near the company’s fiber network backbone or in fiber-fed multitenant office buildings.
The company also offers hosted VoIP and fully managed IP networking solutions, and can manage a customer’s local area network (LAN) and all of their network equipment within their office IT environment.
“Our consultative sales team invests in understanding a customer’s business priorities in order to tailor IT recommendations that will address the customer’s needs while alleviating technology pain points,” Shirish Lal, CenturyLink’s chief marketing officer, told eWEEK. “Our local service and support is also welcomed by SMB customers who don’t always have the option of working with technology providers that have feet on the ground in their communities.”
Lal noted CenturyLink is not making pricing details available due to the vast range of options and features available within the bundled solutions the company designed for SMB customers using gigabit fiber.
“Pricing is convenient and predictable as a low monthly price per employee user, which for CenturyLink’s managed solutions includes providing, managing and maintaining all equipment, hardware and software,” Lal said.
Earlier this year, the company acquired Orchestrate, a business that offers a managed database service for rapid application development. The acquisition enhances the CenturyLink Cloud platform with new database-as-a-service (DBaaS) capabilities and adds Orchestrate’s data services team to the company’s product development and technology organization.
Orchestrate provides multiple flavors of managed NoSQL databases and provides full-text search, time series, graph and key-value storage through a single application programming interface (API) that combines the developer-friendliness of NoSQL databases with the reliability of distributed databases.