(Newswire.net — August 7, 2015) — Every major investment in America’s future – the Erie Canal, the Transcontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System, the Internet – has paid huge dividends: higher-speed connectivity, dramatically lower costs and greatly increased efficiency. These revolutionary improvements in infrastructure have sparked explosions in communication, creativity and commerce. No one knows just how many pure, digital enterprises the Internet has created – it surely numbers in the tens of thousands – but today, every business, even brick-and-mortar enterprises, must have a virtual life in order to survive and grow.
In that spirit, CenturyLink, Inc. recently launched 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) fiber service to Southern Utah businesses in St. George, Cedar City, Hurricane and Washington. Park City, Lehi, and three additional cities are coming. It’s part of what we’re calling a “virtual cycle”—the more installed bandwidth in one area, the greater the demand for higher capacity everywhere else, a kind of bandwagon effect. (A Wall Street Journal story last month reports that high-speed Internet access is driving up the price of houses, as more people base home-buying decisions on the availability of broadband.)
Becoming a “Gig City” confers an important seal of approval on a community for a number of reasons: It “future proofs” a city in terms of broadband capacity, giving the capacity it needs to expand; it provides an essential foundation to attract new businesses, as well as offering key services to such anchor institutions as schools and libraries; and it makes available a critical broadband platform—FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises) technology—that can support speeds of up to 1 Gbps. So equipped, Gig Cities can become magnets for capital investments.
Closing the “fiber gap” especially helps small and midsized businesses by giving them increased Internet speeds. Why is that important? You need them to exploit next-generation services, a suite of essential tools including data connectivity, hosting and managed information technology solutions that can help small enterprises compete on the same field as larger corporations. For the first time, multiple employees at the same locations will be able to access the Internet at the same time, with no slowdown in service. Imagine how much more work everyone can do without having to wait … and wait … for a file to load.
Why one-Gigabit “symmetrical” speed—and what does it mean? It’s “symmetrical” because it allows your Internet connection to upload data at the same ultra-fast speed as you download information. When you import large multi-media files, you’re downloading. That’s important, to be sure. But you need the same kind of rapid speed in uploading, if you’re pushing more of your workloads to the cloud for backup and storage. That opens new opportunities for companies and their clients, like supporting video conferencing or uploading a high-definition training video in just seconds.
Symmetrical bandwidth also creates opportunities for significant cost savings. To take just one example, with 1 Gbps service businesses can buy their IT infrastructure through the cloud—and avoid the expense of on-site servers, as well as the maintenance of such equipment and hardware.
The siren call of 1 Gbps is a game changer, and we’re proud to be leading the way.
We’re now offering access to the highest Internet speeds in parts of 20 states. Moreover, our service relies on our existing fiber infrastructure to connect a high-quality advanced, global fiber optic network that delivers speeds of 100 gigabits per second across the United States and in selected international cities. That puts awesome power into the hands of small and midsized businesses.
Welcome to Gig City.
Jeremy Ferkin is Vice President of Operations, Utah, Nevada, and California for CenturyLink, Inc. (NYSE:CTL). Look for CenturyLink throughout the Salt Lake City via the #HereForGood community campaign.