CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) may be facing new competition from Google Fiber (NASDAQ: GOOG) in Salt Lake City, but the telco has some ambitious plans to expand its 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service by bringing it to 505 new multi-unit housing developments this year in Utah.

But even before Google Fiber lays one fiber on a pole this year, it's clear that the telco has a wide a lead over whatever the search engine giant's plans are for Salt Lake City.

"By end of year, we will build Gig into 505 developments across Utah," said Jeremy Ferkin, vice president of Utah operations for CenturyLink, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "If you think in terms of average size of development that's north of 100 homes, you're looking at a fairly sizeable deployment of 1 Gbps services in the residential market."

Ferkin added that in the Salt Lake City metro area, one of the initial markets where it began offering 1 Gbps fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) services to business customers, "we are looking at 300 developments that have Gig to the home all new over the last 18 months total."

The service provider is not going about it alone in expanding its FTTH service to more residential users. It is also working with master plan community developers like Daybreak.

In late February, CenturyLink announced that it made its 1 Gbps service available to 3,600 residents of Daybreak.

"We announced a large deal with Daybreak that will equip 3,600 homes with FTTH so it's a fairly massive scaled build that is really setting the stage for the future of what's going on," Ferkin said. "In Utah they talk about it being the silicon slopes and what CenturyLink is doing is building the gigabit economy that's driving the silicon slopes' future."

Besides the residential market, CenturyLink continues to expand the availability of the 1 Gbps service into more business locations.

Initially available to 2,500 businesses in Salt Lake City metro targeting multi-tenant units (MTUs), the service provider said it has tripled that amount over the past year.

"What we announced last year was 2,500 businesses in the Salt Lake City metro, but right now we're well north of three times that in terms of businesses that have fiber available to them," Ferkin said.

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