CenturyLink、ファイバーネットワークを4.7Mマイルに拡大

CenturyLinkのファイバーネットワーク拡張の第一段階は、350万マイルを超え、今では70以上の米国の都市に到達しています。CenturyLink is expanding its intercity fiber network to a total of 4.7 million miles, making it the largest network of its kind in North America, according to the company. The company is also laying new fiber in parts of Europe. The first phase of CenturyLink’s fiber network expansion was completed in June, and it now reaches more than 70 U.S. cities including many of the country’s most populated metropolitan areas. The company’s fiber network in the United States now traverses more than 3.5 million miles. A forthcoming fiber deployment, which the company expects to be completed by early 2021, will add an additional 1.2 million miles of fiber to parts of Europe. The entire effort is an overbuild, which means CenturyLink is using existing multi-conduit infrastructure that was originally installed about 20 years ago to deploy new fiber technology and add network capacity as needed. The company also operates a long-haul network and dense metro networks. CenturyLink is using low-loss fiber technology from Corning for the build, which has a silica core design and offers the “lowest loss of any terrestrial-grade optical fiber,” according to the company. CenturyLink says it’s selling fiber routes to large enterprises and content providers in the U.S. “We expanded our intercity fiber network because we saw a tremendous demand for dark fiber driven by web-scale companies building data center connectivity between cities, as well as large enterprise businesses needing low-latency network infrastructure,” CenturyLink CTO Andrew Dugan wrote in response to questions. “As the demand for high-capacity, low-latency data transport continues to grow, web-scale companies, large enterprise businesses, content providers, government agencies and communications providers are seeking more fiber for building their own secure, scalable networks for next-generation applications,” Dugan explained. CenturyLink is positioning the network for applications running on 5G, including augmented reality, high-definition video streaming, and IoT devices. “We envision web-scale companies, large enterprise businesses, content providers, government agencies, and communications providers utilizing this fiber to unlock the opportunities presented by [IoT] and other transformative technologies,” Dugan wrote.