Originally published in Las Vegas Citylife on September 24, 2013

Earlier this month, CenturyLink announced their intention to bring 1 gigabit fiber Internet service to the Las Vegas valley. This move will add Las Vegas to the small list of cities in the United States with such access speeds, and I was super excited to talk to the fine folks at CenturyLink to learn all about gigabits and fibers and whatever else they were willing to say about Internets and Technologies.

Unfortunately, my questions to CenturyLink were intercepted by their public relations team, turning a potentially useful information mining session into an exercise of reading a lot of words that actually say as little as possible (kind of like this twice a month column, in fact). Still, I did manage to find out some useful bits and now I will share them, because hey, this is potentially a big deal among people who care about things like gigabit Internet in Las Vegas, ie me and maybe you too if you’re still here. Here’s what we do know:

To start, the service area will only include select northwest Las Vegas neighborhoods, but CenturyLink has not revealed particular street boundaries. When asked specifically about downtown neighborhoods (under the guise of the ‘tech boom’ but in reality because that is where this columnist lives), we were told “the downtown area is part of [CenturyLink’s] research for 2014 development of the 1 gigabit fiber service network, and we can consider a fiber build out in the area if there is enough demand.”

We should all consider that to be a enthusiastic “Yes!” to downtown fiber, right? I can’t wait!

The rollout will take place over the next few months, continuing into 2014 as initial customer demand is evaluated blah blah basically if people buy it they’ll keep rolling it out I guess.

Unlike with current CenturyLink Internet services, gigabit users will not be subjected to the company’s Excessive Use Policy, and no bandwidth limits will be enforced. When I asked about home server restrictions, an issue that has recently been brought to light by Google’s initial banning and subsequently allowance of non-commercial servers, I was offered the helpful “CenturyLink is still determining how server use on the gigabit network will be regulated.” Were I to guess, which I’m about to do, I’d guess this: CenturyLink will tacitly allow the use of servers on a gigabit account while maintaining the freedom of restriction in their terms of service. Google received a fair amount of flack over this, and I expect CenturyLink to attempt to make it as much of a nonissue as possible.

Pricing for CenturyLink gigabit access will range widely, depending on the additional bundled services the customer chooses to go with. For standalone Internet service, the cost will be $149.95 a month, double what Google Fiber is charging for the same access in other municipalities. Throw in another CenturyLink service such as Prism TV or unlimited calling and the cost goes down to a much more palatable $79.95, but then you’ve still got the costs of your bundled services to consider, which is odd because honestly I really don’t think there’s a lot of crossover between the sort of person in the market for a new landline and those who are planning to increase their Internet access speeds to 1 gigabit levels. Hell, even television service is less appealing these days, more so when one happens to have fiber optic Internet running to the house. Anyway, whatever, 1 gigabit access will range between $79.95 and $149.95 per month.

So, assuming the rollout happens as planned, would I recommend CenturyLink’s gigabit Internet service?

Consider this. Cox Communication’s $110 highest-end Ultimate tier was recently increased to 150 Mpbs down and 20 Mbps up. Assuming speeds are as advertised (yes, that’s a hell of an assumption from both of the involved parties), fiber to the home from CenturyLink would run ya only $40 more for over 6x the download speed and a whopping 50x increase in upload speed. That’s a lot of increase.

Would you use all this new bandwidth? Who knows. First of all, you’ll need to make sure that your home network can support the speed – that’ll mean new hardware if it’s been a few years since you’ve upgraded your network gear.

Second, bottlenecks along the way will prevent you from frequently seeing peak speeds for individual transfers, although with the high ceiling of gigabit, multiple heavy users in a single household will rarely interfere with each other. No matter what the rest of the family is doing in the other room, what with their Netflixes and Xboxes and all, your porn is gonna get to you blazing fast.

At this point I’ll give the service a hesitant yes. Partly because it’s new and shiny and fast Internet, and who doesn’t love new and shiny and fast Internet, but mostly because I need all of you living up there in the Southern Utah parts of Las Vegas to buy in and make the service successful so CenturyLink will actually expand and bring gigabit Internet down my way. Oh, and if you do pick up the service? Send me a note and let me know what you think.