CenturyLink To Buy Level 3 For $34 Billion, Create a More Formidable Competitor To AT&T (bloomberg.com) 67
In what is seen as a move to build a more formidable competitor to AT&T, rival CenturyLink today announced it is buying Level 3 Communications for about $34 billion in cash and stock. From a report on Bloomberg: Both companies have amassed giant networks to haul internet traffic through deals over the years. Level 3 is one of the largest providers used by internet services including Netflix and Google to route traffic across the web, operations that would bolster CenturyLink's core offerings to businesses. Level 3 was the second-biggest U.S. provider of ethernet services -- running high-bandwidth internet connections for companies -- in the first half of this year, trailing only AT&T, according to Vertical Systems Group. CenturyLink was fifth on the list.
Re:CenturyLink is an EXTREMELY abusive company. (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying they are better than At&T?
Re:CenturyLink is an EXTREMELY abusive company. (Score:4, Interesting)
We need more competition, not less. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The government needs to block this merger as well as the AT&T/TW merger. We need to have more choices when it comes to internet providers, not fewer. Pretty soon there will be a single source for the internet and they'll give you a 'bend over, take it or leave it' choice and that's all.
The government needs to allow the merger of AT&T and TW... if they break the new company up into five pieces, where the pieces all cover the same region. While they are at it, do the same with Comcast, Charter and Verizon.
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AT&T was broken up before because it was too big and anti-competitive. Now it is almost what it was again through the bits being renamed several times, "pivoted", bought by others (mostly other supposedly independent bits) and then bought back / merged again. There was an infographic going around last week that detailed how they are basically back where they were.
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Not interested in chopping up, interested in overlapping. I'm fine if we keep the same number so long as they become truly national and all cover the same area. If I remember correctly, the Charter vs Comcast coverage maps are just pitiful. Where I live, I can get Charter, or I can get low speed DSL (I'm not talking the 6M DSL the commercials say is so slow, that would be passable if not great).
Re:We need more competition, not less. (Score:5, Insightful)
The government needs to block this merger as well as the AT&T/TW merger. We need to have more choices when it comes to internet providers, not fewer. Pretty soon there will be a single source for the internet and they'll give you a 'bend over, take it or leave it' choice and that's all.
AT&T is not buying Time Warner Cable (Charter already did that). Time Warner Cable (TWC) is not a part of Time Warner anymore (it was spun out years ago). AT&T is trying to buy Time Warner Inc (TWI), the media company (Warner Brothers Studios, Turner broadcasting, HBO, etc). Also should be noted that this also does not involve Time, inc., the publishing company (Time magazine, etc) which was also spun off years ago.
Now I personally believe there are still valid reasons to not allow it, but let's stop getting confused over what company is actually being bought and what they do.
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I know that all of these "Time"s have spun off, but had they formed independently they'd all be suing each other over trademark infringement. They may be all in different industries, but they're all large enough that it causes the same kind of confusion that trademark protection was supposed to prevent.
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I know that all of these "Time"s have spun off, but had they formed independently they'd all be suing each other over trademark infringement. They may be all in different industries, but they're all large enough that it causes the same kind of confusion that trademark protection was supposed to prevent.
Yea I honestly don't get why Time Warner Cable kept that name when they spun out. It causes confusion and it's not like it was a well liked company (as far as cable service goes) to begin with. Ditto for TWC/TWI keeping the "Time" in their names after the Time, inc. divestiture; it's confusing as hell. Thankfully Charter is re-branding itself and TWC as "Spectrum" so that association in people's minds should go away in half a decade or so. If AT&T does manage to get Time Warner hopefully they will ditch
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Thankfully Charter is re-branding itself and TWC as "Spectrum" so that association in people's minds should go away in half a decade or so.
Is that really for real, though? I thought it was more like Comcast's Xfinity. Name your product something different, pretend it's your company's name but never actually change the company name.
Honestly, that just adds to the confusion even more (I'm in a Charter region).
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I'm sure Charter's corporate name will stick around,
Re:We need more competition, not less. (Score:4, Insightful)
AT&T and TW do not compete. Centurylink and Level3 do not compete (for residential service).
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yeah, ok
i remember the good old days 20 years ago when a trace route across state lines resulted in a few dozen hops and a dozen or so different network providers with each one adding latency
streaming video was impossible on the old internet before the ISP's and backbone networks began to merge
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MCI did not buy UUNET. Worldcom bought UUNET then bought MCI. I worked for MCI at the time. Hence my user name. We were praying British Telecom would win the bid. But the felons won. What killed MCI was they bought SkyTel and passed on buying Cellular One. They bet on pagers. MCI then resold Sprint PCS cell service. But never owned a cell company. Worldcom was LDDS then bought Brooks Fiber and UUNET. Then got MCI and then MFS. Worldcom imploded AFTER the FCC killed to buyout of Sprint. We became MCI again.
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Worldcom owned Global Crossing. Verizon got them when they bought the old Worldcom/MCI. Level 3 bought Global Crossing in 2011 and still own it.
Yes, "competitor" (Score:1)
Some competitor... both my DirecTV and AT&T Wireless accounts try to get me to bundle with CenturyLink ADSL.
More to the point, buying Level 3 makes them a competitor in an entirely different area, one in which they were not obviously competing in the first place.
More like a formidable competitor to competition (Score:2)
Re:More like a formidable competitor to competitio (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure that's true. Make "the last mile" a standardized utility. This would make it far easier for many competitors to enter the market because they wouldn't have to string potentially redundant wires to jillions of homes: they'd only have to hook up to routing nodes, set roughly a mile apart from each other.
You can then change ISP and content providers without anyone having to visit your house: it's all done at the routing nodes. (That part could perhaps even be made remote-controlled so that a truck doesn't even have to visit the nodes.)
The last-mile problem is the current bottleneck to competition. Remove that barrier by shifting it to a utility, and we then get real competition instead of the 2 co-shitty ISP's a typical city has to choose between.
Some may argue that a utility would be slow to add speed improvements, which would typically increase over time based on past patterns. But I'd sacrifice growing speed for reliability and choice. Reliability and choice are something the current oligopolies consistently suck at: they crawl on weekends and force you buy crap you don't want to get what you do want (bundling). Let alone crappy customer service.
Re:More like a formidable competitor to competitio (Score:4, Insightful)
Why on earth would you want two or more ISPs to compete over you over a common backbone? That would require competition, something the ISPs obviously don't want. It would also require someone to foot the bill for that last mile infrastructure. ISPs have fought for years to not have to share their lines, nor have a city be able to put in their own lines. It's much better the way it is where one ISP control the area and kick and scream and pout whenever there's an effort to try to modernize the service.
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Most of the current ones don't match their advertised speed anyhow unless you test at say 9 am Wednesday morning.
If speed is ALL you care about, then my suggestion is probably not for you. Like I said, I'd prefer reliability and content choice over (spotty) speed, and suspect most others would agree.
Suppose we kept things as they are and you purchased the best high-speed package available. It may zoom during non-peak hours and you could watch your favorite shows in real-time in HD during these non-peak hour
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Suppose we kept things as they are and you purchased the best high-speed package available. It may zoom during non-peak hours and you could watch your favorite shows in real-time in HD during these non-peak hours, but during peak hours it would crawl.
Do you understand that MOST PEOPLE do not have the highest speed connection available to them, yet they still have no trouble at all streaming their favorite shows in HD in realtime?
Its pretty clear now that you dont know shit about your local government, because if tech people in your area were actually involved in your local government, the threat of pulling the local isp's franchise agreements would have already gotten them to offer at least 5-mbit service. However you are so fucking apathetic about l
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Side note Re Sig: "We believe that Internet Explorer is a really good browser" - Steve Jobs, 1997'
In 1997 it was, compared to the other offerings of the time. It was roughly equivalent to Netscape in quality and features, and the other browsers were still playing catch-up.
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Just go out to your local used music store and buy some Level 42. Then you're way ahead of all of them.
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And the level 420 back room at the used music store.
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They have to do a lot of grinding and kill a few boss monsters before they become level 4.
Formidable? (Score:5, Interesting)
They've made a choice to not maintain their network infrastructure, both for legacy and for their DSL broadband customer base. Why should we trust them do do any better with anything else, let alone a build-out that's not even really that far along yet?
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I have no love for cable either, b
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They've made a choice to not maintain their network infrastructure
It's what all the big boys are doing. If they can rot out their copper, they can stop dealing with it and replace with fiber.
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I think you mean LTE.
They're only rolling out fiber where they're legally obligated to, and they are spending a lot of money on lawyers to get them out of those obligations, with varying degrees of success.
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The reason to use the copper is so when there's a disaster or some other emergency, there's a phone system that's not dependent on fairly vulnerable cell towers. I've seen T-Mobile, Ve
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In the case of CenturyLink specifically, unless they want to go the MNVO route, they probably don't care what you do after their service becomes unusable. It sounds like they're just shoring up their business customer base so they can afford to bleed residential customers until they don't have any anymore.
In my experience, companies like CenturyLink and Frontier are where residential communications infrastructure goes to die.
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OP said "throughout the city." LTE isn't a landline-replacement in the city - only rural.
Maybe they won't roll fiber unless they're obligated to - but that means it's pretty likely they won't want to maintain BOTH anywhere. Rolling out fiber means maintaining fiber AND copper. I'm pretty sure they're legally obligated not to rip out functioning copper.
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Of course it isn't. You and I know that. And I'd be willing to bet that the people who are actually responsible for designing and deploying the networks know it too.
But if the lawyers can convince a city council that deploying LTE to replace the aging copper infrastructure is just as good as fiber, what financial department would approve the roll out fiber when they could approve a much cheaper, much higher margin LTE installation instead?
Re:Ugh, time to start shopping for a new ISP (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, you probably don't have the redundancy you think you do. I see this crap all the time from the other side. Some hospital or bank orders two connections from Telco A and Telco B, and Telco B turns around and buys the local access from Telco A. Even if the local loops are different facilities, it's almost certain the same long haul fiber is being used. You'd get better reliability if you ordered diverse service from Telco A, then they would know and be able to control both paths.
Re:Ugh, time to start shopping for a new ISP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ugh, time to start shopping for a new ISP (Score:5, Informative)
As someone who has priced and engineered these services from the carrier side, what you have to do is request maps. If it's a layer 3 service you also need to make sure the two terminating routers are fed diversely. It's pretty common to be able to get a Google Earth KMZ file of the physical path, but expect to pay much more because last mile diversity usually requires construction.
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As someone who has priced and engineered these services from the carrier side, what you have to do is request maps.
When the CIOs buying it don't read maps and sign contracts before anyone technical has even looked at it, maps don't help. They only help if you are doing it right. In which case, we generally don't look at maps, but instead outline in the contract that the diverse paths may never cross, and must always be at least 40 meters apart (or some distance such they they aren't buried on different sides of the same road). Though the only choice here will sell you "diversity" but doesn't guarantee diversity, as a
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If you don't request a map, the specific diversity details might not actually get into the hands of the people engineering the circuit/service. It's very common for the order to be entered into some system and the actual service order document to only be looked at by people who don't even really understand the language around diversity requirements.
However, if you request a map and (if needed) raise a stink, someone on the sales/order management side has to get in touch with someone in Engineering. When I w
CenturyLink bought Baby Bell Qwest (Score:3)
It's interesting to see the larger (old) AT&T successors competing back again...
New AT&T is, of course, former Baby Bell "Southwestern Bell", which bought the old AT&T, including the AT&T Long Lines department (and, of course, AT&T Long Distance, which is still a functioning corporate unit and is still "the old AT&T"). With CenturyLink, we'll now have two Baby Bells with significant fiber footprints. (As others have pointed out, AT&T / TW doesn't involve TWC/Comcast though.)
It's arguable whether the reconstitution of mega backbones was inevitable. Although divestiture helped competition (MCI, of course) and helped explosively develop the technical capacity needed for internet growth, economies of scale do come back into play. Especially when massive capital outlays come into play.
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Yeah, I have to agree with this. I had (old) AT&T Wireless and it was freaking awesome in San Diego.
If SBC had adopted old AT&T's engineering practices, maybe it wouldn't suck as much now.
Centurylink and customer service (Score:3)
Before they go buying up a titan like Level3, they need to be spending at least 1/4 of that cash in client support and relations. I've heard (and experienced) nothing but bad things about their client support. They have a serious disconnect between the call center level and field tech, making for awful ticket response and lousy on site times.
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I despise CL customer service with a white hot passion. I typically suffer through local DSLAM issues for weeks before I finally generate enough energy to go through the hell that is CL customer service. It's about time for me to call them again about relocating my service to a different pole. I've tried 3 times, the process involves being transferred repeatedly till I get disconnected.