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CenturyLink's Much-Hyped Twin Cities Broadband is Slow in Arriving

As the company bombards local TV viewers with ads that promote the offering -- "What will you do with your gig?" -- the 1-gigabit-per-second service is not yet widely available

(TNS) -- Phone company and broadband provider CenturyLink has made much of a new and much-faster home-Internet service, which it said last summer would roll out across portions of St. Paul and Minneapolis in the following months.

Nearly six months later, as CenturyLink bombards local TV viewers with ads that promote the offering -- "What will you do with your gig?" -- the 1-gigabit-per-second service is not yet widely available.

CenturyLink has provided few details about its deployment plans, but does note that pockets of the metro area are now able to order 1-gigabit-service. Sleuthing by tech-savvy locals and address checks on the CenturyLink website appear to confirm this.

But in most of St. Paul, CenturyLink's broadband tops out at about 40 megabits per second -- a fraction of 1 gigabit, or 1,000 megabits, per second. And some residences only qualify for a much-slower service.

The 1-gigabit service would blow away market leader Comcast and most other Twin Cities competitors.

CenturyLink said Tuesday that it expects to be providing the 1-gigabit service to tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents later this year.

Spokeswoman Joanna Hjelmeland said she could not be specific about where this would happen "for proprietary reasons," but added, "we're excited about our progress."

CenturyLink's new service relies on fiber-optic cables, which have to be installed onto telephone poles block by block, and not the older copper-wire conduits already on the poles. CenturyLink is the metro area's primary landline telephone-service provider.

"The process of rolling out 1-gig service is a significant undertaking with network planning and engineering," Hjelmeland said.

The service's sparse availability to date comes as no surprise to Christopher Mitchell of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which documents broadband deployments around the state.

"This is exactly what I expected," said Mitchell, the director of a community-broadband initiative at the decades-old nonprofit.

Installing fiber across a city is "still very capital-intensive," Mitchell said. "CenturyLink does not have a whole lot of money to upgrade its infrastructure. They are spread very thin."

When it announced the Twin Cities fiber service for homes and businesses last year, it said it would do the same in nine other U.S. cities. Six cities would get business-only service.

"This is an expensive investment" for CenturyLink, said Mitchell, "and they do not want to spook investors by suggesting they take money out of dividends and put it in capital investments."

CenturyLink has not said how much money it would need to deploy fiber across St. Paul, but Mitchell estimates this can easily run between $100 million and $300 million.

Doing the entire metro area? A cool billion, Mitchell speculates.

In last year's third quarter, CenturyLink reported adjusted net income of $359 million on revenue of about $4 billion. CenturyLink's history in this area goes back to 2011, when the Louisiana company took over the former multi-state Baby Bell territory operated by Qwest.

Tech-savvy Twin Cities residents, frustrated with CenturyLink's slow fiber-deployment progress, are documenting the 1-gig rollout. They've crunched publicly available CenturyLink data to create maps that pinpoint inner-city areas that apparently qualify for 1-gigabit service.

A recent map variation displays a single pin for St. Paul. This translates into a roughly two-block section bordered by East Stillwater Avenue on the north, East Seventh Street on the south, White Bear Avenue on the east and North Kennard Street on the west.

Plugging addresses from that section into a CenturyLink search engine confirms that those residences qualify for 1-gigabit service. Addresses outside that section do not.

CenturyLink has said it will price its new service at about $80 a month if bundled with other services, such as telephone and DirecTV, and $109 a month if Internet access is purchased by itself.

CenturyLink is not the only Internet provider promising superfast speeds. Minnetonka-based U.S. Internet, which has deployed fiber in large swaths of Minneapolis, recently announced 10-gigabit service along with its existing 1-gigabit service.

So far, two residences have signed up for the 10-gig service, which costs $400 a month. The 1-gig service runs $65 a month.

U.S. Internet also is set to announce a significant Minneapolis expansion in the coming weeks, said Travis Carter, vice-president of technology. Fiber in that expansion region would be installed in the summer.

But while U.S. Internet has said it wants to move into St. Paul, no announcements along those lines are imminent, Carter said.

Comcast's residential broadband, which tops out at about 100 megabits per second, is more than double what CenturyLink provides using copper wire but would be eclipsed by 1-gig service. The cable company has not said when it might offer gigabit-grade home broadband.

Google has made a business of broadband with its Google Fiber division. That company announced Tuesday that its 1-gigabit service is expanding from three to seven cities, but the Twin Cities area was not on the list.

©2015 the Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minn.)