CenturyLink intends to overtake top residential-broadband provider Comcast with a new fiber-optic service it said will provide the Twin Cities’ fastest-ever home-Internet speed of 1 gigabit per second.

The service would smoke cable company Comcast’s home Internet speeds, which top out at about 100 megabits per second in the Twin Cities.

CenturyLink is announcing the service Tuesday and intends to roll it out gradually across the Twin Cities in the coming months. The company has confirmed that the inner cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis will be part of the effort but would not specify which other metro-area municipalities might get the service.

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CenturyLink, the dominant local landline phone company, is pricing the new service at about $80 a month if bundled with other services, such as telephone and DirecTV, or $109 a month if Internet access is purchased alone. This pricing is roughly in line with 105-megabit-per-second Comcast service, which debuted in the Twin Cities last year.

CenturyLink’s new service is said to be “symmetrical,” meaning its download and upload speeds are about the same. With Comcast, upload speeds are slower than download speeds.

Along with its new residential service, CenturyLink is announcing a gigabit-per-second offering for small and medium-size Twin Cities businesses. Those businesses will start receiving the service sooner than households. CenturyLink won’t reveal small-business pricing because that is based on a variety of complex factors, it noted.

In addition to the Twin Cities, 12 other U.S. metro areas are getting CenturyLink’s gigabit-per-second Internet service, solely for businesses in some places and for both business and homes in others. CenturyLink has already tested this service in Omaha, Neb., Las Vegas and Salt Lake City.

The offering is comparable in performance to the Google Fiber service that the Internet titan is rolling out amid much publicity in a handful of U.S. cities. Minnetonka-based broadband provider US Internet already offers gigabit-per-second Internet service in some parts of Minneapolis.

The new CenturyLink service involves fiber-optic connections directly to residences or business structures — itself a significant development because such hookups are rare in the metro area. When CenturyLink residential customers sign up for the service, the company will have to install a direct, physical fiber-optic connection to the home in order for the service to work.

Though some outstate Minnesota communities have fiber directly to residences, often via independent telecommunications cooperatives, a fiber deployment of this kind from a leading telecommunications company in the Twin Cities breaks new ground — literally — because it will often require digging up streets and burying the thin silica or plastic fibers inside protective pipes, then adding more fiber for the connections to the homes.

CenturyLink’s traditional Internet services have been delivered to residences using older-style copper phone lines. Fiber hookups have tended to be a corporate perk in large cities. Until now, certain US Internet customers in Minneapolis have been among a minority of Twin Cities residential-broadband users with fiber to their homes at a cost of $65 a month.

Who gets CenturyLink’s new gigabit-per-second service, and when, depends on a number of factors, the company cautioned. Fiber to homes requires the existence of nearby fiber infrastructure, and for now this is present only in parts of the Twin Cities. A major effort to install more fiber will unfold over the next few years, CenturyLink said.

To do so, the company needs permission from the municipalities, and not all local governments are on board. CenturyLink said it will engage in negotiations with a number of them in the coming months, with the outcomes determining its precise Internet-via-fiber footprint in the greater Twin Cities area.

Gigabit-per-second residential Internet bordered on science fictional, at least in the United States, until Google shook up the industry with its Google Fiber and created competitive pressures. CenturyLink’s service can be partially seen as a response to Google Fiber.

Gigabit-per-second hookups, according to Google Fiber, allow users to download one 14-gigabyte movie in less than two minutes, to stream five high-definition movies at once with bandwidth left over for email and Web surfing, to transfer data over the Internet faster than writing to a thumb drive and to download data as fast as many computers can save it to a hard drive.

CenturyLink said that later this month, it will show off the gigabit-per-second service at the Minnesota State Fair.