By Karl Bode
CenturyLink is promising to expand faster broadband to 3 million new customers by the end of the year, as the company struggles with defections by customers annoyed by lagging speed upgrades. Like most second-tier telcos, CenturyLink's failure to upgrade its network at any real scale has resulted in it losing DSL customers to cable providers, who are now starting to more broadly deliver gigabit speeds. That's especially true across the second and third tier cities and smaller towns and rural markets these telcos simply don't think are worth upgrading.
As such, CenturyLink felt it was necessary to issue a press release this week proclaiming that the company would be deploying faster speeds to up to 3 million customers by the end of this year.