Thursday, August 27, 2015

CenturyLink Expands High Speed Internet In Rural Utah

CenturyLink announced Thursday that it is bringing high speed Internet service to 4,300 rural households and rural businesses, after receiving funding from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s Connect America Fund (CAF). CenturyLink said the deal is part of one of 33, CAF statewide offers it is accepting from the FCC, worth a total of approximately $500M a year for six years, to bring at least 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload service to rural areas around the country. CenturyLink did not say exactly which rural communities in Utah will be served by the new, high speed Internet access. High speed Internet access has been hard to come by in rural areas, due to the very high cost of infrastructure required to bring that connectivity to rural locations; the FCC's CAF program was created to address the divide between urban and rural locations with respect to those costs.