CenturyLink broadband availability is uneven, with rural markets suffering, report shows

CenturyLink revealed in its semi-annual broadband deployment report to the Federal Communications Commission that 51 percent of the living units in its more populated legacy Qwest territory can get 40 Mbps or higher. But rural areas overwhelmingly get much slower speeds, showing the disparity between different markets.

In the rural sections of CenturyLink’s legacy Qwest footprint, only 21.9 percent of households can get access to a 40 Mbps copper-based service. The disparity is due to the challenge of deploying copper-based broadband. Despite advances like VDSL2 and vectoring, CenturyLink is stymied by the physical limitations of copper plant that require electronics to be placed closer to each customer. The service provider saw similar variations between rural and non-rural markets for its 12 Mbps and 5 Mbps service. CenturyLink’s 12 Mbps service availability non-rural markets was 71 percent, a figure that drops to 47.6 percent in rural markets. Likewise, the 5 Mbps tier was available to nearly 80 percent of living units in non-rural Qwest markets, while only 61.3 percent could get the same service. Finally, the 1.5 Mbps service fared a bit better with service noted to be available in 95.6 percent of non-rural markets and 83 percent in rural markets. Regardless of the differences in the availability of copper-based broadband service speeds, CenturyLink is making progress across all of its markets to make higher speeds available to more customers.