There have been a few articles recently about the fiber optic / Gigabit options being built out in Green Lake, Maple Leaf, and Victory Heights. It seems like CenturyLink continues to be very conservative about what they’ll commit to as they are exceeding their public estimates by a lot. Which really isn’t a bad thing. I’d like to know more but I prefer that they under promise and over deliver to the alternative. They seem to be expanding fast into unannounced neighborhoods like Maple Leaf, Victory Heights, and even Pinehurst.
Right now in Pinehurst there is active work going on here:
120th St from 25th Ave to 20th Ave
120th St from 19th Ave to 12th Ave
120th St from 9th Ave to 5th Ave
It sounds like there is a lot more coming too. The plan is to build out the “whole area” and there are many orders that are in design and not yet to construction. There are 30+ crews working in North Seattle. It really sounds like the goal is to build everywhere though again, I don’t have specific dates or boundaries.
Dale Burnett, the Construction Project Administrator at CenturyLink said, in reference to Victory Heights:
“We are hoping to complete by the end of May.
Feel free to post my name and cell 425-516-3023 on your blog.
If anyone in your neighborhood is interested in the service just have them call me with number and address.
I will then reach out to them when its available.”
You can also email him at Dale.Burnett@Centurylink.com. He’s been very helpful so sharing your interest and address certainly wouldn’t hurt. The addresses above show that this really does include Pinehurst as well. And I know people are excited here.
Is there a map?
Unfortunately not. I don’t think they have one, just a bunch of work orders. If you look at the other articles linked at the top, Pinehurst, Victory Heights, and Maple Leaf aren’t even included in the list of neighborhoods they’ve announced. But they’re building here anyway.
I don’t need a lot of speed but would like a non-bundled Internet cable service that is cheaper than Comcast. Is this a possibility with Gigabit?
Garth – I don’t know the unbundled price but I’m relatively sure it’s quite a bit cheaper than Comcast.
I’m not that optimistic about the price. The last time I checked, I would pay more for DSL a la carte than Comcast Internet a la carte (after the promotional period ends), and it would be 10x slower. I don’t know why CenturyLink’s offering would become both faster and cheaper. Competition might help in the long term.
I live at NE 120th & 12th Ave NE, and last week I saw a cable installer placing an extra cable alongside the existing telephone line and then circularly wrapping the two lines together. I assumed that this is probably the cable for the new 1 Gigabyte service. Of course, if you call CenturyLink, they will not tell you what the cost of the new service will be. As excited as I would be to find an alternative to Comcast, I would be willing to bet that, CenturyLink will offer a good price for a limited amount of time (six months, one year) to entice new customers, after which your monthly rate will rise dramatically and continue to rise periodically. In addition, they will try to get you to “bundle” your services, something that might decrease the individual costs of the services (landline, cellular phone, cable internet, cable television), but something that just results in committing you to pay a large monthly sum to Big Brother. In the long run, their service will undoubtedly be as expensive as Comcast. It isn’t as though CenturyLink is some kind of “benevolent” corporation.
CenturyLink does offer 1 year promo pricing. They also have a two year price which is a bit more but which locks it in for longer. And it looked to me like their pricing unbundled is relatively comparable to Comcast. And I’m hoping that competition helps too. But it’s hard to see the real numbers for either of them.
And it’s not that CenturyLink is going to give it away. Or not try to make money off the higher margin services like TV. But right now CenturyLink offers me 7 Mbps which isn’t even an option for a lot of what I need to do. So I literally have a single option for high speed Internet. There is no competition at all and no choice.
And for people who want higher speeds, Comcast caps out relatively low compared to much of the world. CenturyLink is going to be offering Gigabit (1000 Mbps) which is insanely fast. And at least when bundled it’s not an unreasonable price:
https://www.centurylink.com/fiber/plans-and-pricing/seattle-washington/
Also, I have seen pricing on the low end drop as there are higher options available. They try to capture the people willing to pay more with the higher speed services but the super cheap options can get faster when there are even faster options available.