CenturyLink, the third-largest telecommunications company in the United States, continues to grow in Colorado as it expands in its business and residential markets with a host of new innovative services.
CenturyLink provides data, voice and managed services in local, national and select international markets through its high-quality advanced fiber optic network and multiple data centers for businesses and consumers. The company also offers advanced entertainment services under the CenturyLink® Prism™ TV and DIRECTV® brands.
Kenny Wyatt, CenturyLink senior VP
With Colorado positioned to be a leader in telecommunications and technology, CenturyLink tapped Denver as one of 16 markets to launch its high-speed 1 gigabit service last August. Now, the service is available in 16 metro Denver neighborhoods.
“There’s unbelievable growth happening in Colorado and Denver specifically,” says Kenny Wyatt, CenturyLink senior vice president, business solutions. “In technology, there’s a need for both small businesses and residential customers to have access to much higher speeds. We looked at the combination of the market growth, the availability of our assets here locally and landed on Denver being one of the top 16 markets.”
The company’s business solutions for customers of all sizes are driving its growth, with small and midsized businesses continuing to be a focus in Colorado as well as across the country.
“Our small-business customers really are the engine of the U.S. economy,” Wyatt says. “We are arming our small businesses not just with higher speeds but with the ability to do things they couldn’t do even a couple of years ago – taking advantage of the cloud and getting to their own customers more quickly with more agile infrastructure.”
For residential customers, CenturyLink has launched IP-based Prism™ TV video service offering what Wyatt calls “unbelievable choices as well as new technologies for our customers’ video experience.”
Combined with the company’s gigabit service, residential customers can stream more quickly and access more devices.
“We continue to innovate around the home as the core of technology,” Wyatt says.
CenturyLink also emphasizes its investment in the community. In 2014, the company spent almost $3 million in both time and financial resources in Colorado. Employees volunteered at nonprofit agencies and the company invested in organizations such as United Way as well as running its own community-based campaigns.
With an eye toward the future, CenturyLink is making acquisitions of companies that will enable it to bring new and different services to its business customers. It recently purchased a company that is focused on big data.
“We can bring an entire suite of solutions that offer our business customers the ability to think differently about their IT environment,” Wyatt says.
It’s all part of the company’s focus on transforming and rethinking its business model to capture new opportunities that help customers – whether business or residential – become more productive.
In Colorado, CenturyLink will continue its investment in technology that spans residential consumers to its largest business customers. That in turn can help bring new businesses to Colorado, fueling further economic growth.
“We will continue to innovate and bring the best products in the industry to those segments,” Wyatt says.
