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Pressing its foot firmly to the pedal, CenturyLink is stepping up its deployments of GPON, gigabit speeds and Prism TV and seeking to reap more rewards from them this year.
CenturyLink Inc. (NYSE: CTL) reported late Wednesday that it finished up the fourth quarter with 940,000 addressable GPON households and 490,000 addressable businesses. CenturyLink now offers 1 Gbit/s speeds to 780,000 of those homes, which was a 17% increase from the third quarter to the fourth in terms of homes passed.
"We grew our Prism markets with GPON capabilities from 600,000 to 700,000 in [the] fourth quarter and we are seeing really strong take rates, where we have GPON in these homes and businesses, so that is a really positive [thing] for us," CEO Glen Post said on the earnings call, according to a transcript by Seeking Alpha.
The company added more than 16,000 Prism TV subscribers in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to roughly 285,000 at the quarter's end.
Post said CenturyLink had about a 15% penetration rate for its GPON products in the markets where 1Gbit/s broadband and Prism TV were available. While CenturyLink's market share is low in those cities, Post said there was a lot of upside in regards to going into more businesses and connecting more multi-unit dwellings (MDUs).
"More than 30% of our households that we serve are in MDUs, so that is a real market opportunity there as well that we are focused on, so there are some things we are doing, we believe, [that] can really turn around the broadband growth," Post said.
After losing 22,000 broadband customers in the fourth quarter, CenturyLink has approximately 6 million high-speed Internet customers. CenturyLink is projecting single digit broadband growth this year.
CenturyLink's Prism TV and the 1Gbit/s service were topics of discussion in a recent Q&A on Telco Transformation. (See CenturyLink's Middleton Talks About Prism TV, Gigabit Services.)
— Mike Robuck, editor, Telco Transformation
