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CenturyLink Holds Off AT&T, Verizon in Ethernet Rankings
CenturyLink maintains the top spot in Vertical Systems Group’s (VSG) mid-year 2018 U.S. Carrier Ethernet Services Leaderboard after leapfrogging AT&T in the year-end 2017 ranking.
AT&T is in the No. 2 spot, followed by Verizon, Spectrum Enterprise, Comcast, Windstream and Cox. All of the companies maintained their year-end positions.
CenturyLink’s acquisition of Level 3 Communications, along with continued growth in Ethernet ports for both companies, allowed it to power its way to the top of the year-end ranking.
The leaderboard ranks incumbent telcos in order based on U.S. retail Ethernet port share. VSG calls this an industry benchmark for measuring Ethernet market presence.
“After a flurry of M&A activity during the past two years, the Ethernet marketplace stabilized during the first half of 2018,” said Rick Malone, VSG principal. “U.S. port growth was more than 6 percent for the period, with accelerating deployments of multi-gigabit speed services. Most providers experienced acute price compression across all data rates, partially offsetting the revenue typically generated from higher-speed services. All providers are grappling with longer sales cycles due to SD-WAN, however the impact on the U.S. Ethernet base has been negligible to date.”
Other providers selling Ethernet services in the U.S. are segmented into two tiers as measured by port share. The first, or challenge tier, includes Altice USA, Cogent, Frontier Communications, GTT, Sprint – which is attempting to merge with T-Mobile – and Zayo.
The second tier includes such providers as Crown Castle Fiber, FiberLight, Fusion, Masergy, MegaPath – which is being acquired by Fusion – TPx and Vodafone.
Whoever created this high level ranking for CenturyLink either is not a CL customer or they got paid off. Here in the Rocky Mountains CenturyLink service remains slow and unreliable. In fact, this month alone our CL service was down for two days at a time in two different weeks. When AT&T and Verizon decided it would be a clever marketing ploy to start charging extra for decent Internet data communications speed CenturyLink jumped on this exploitation bandwagon with both feet. The only way to stream video off line from CenturyLink is pay maximum fees and still get questionable service. And don’t get me started on calling their tech support. It is an excellent way of losing one half to an hour of your life so you can talk to some foreigner who barely speaks English.
Yeah, you don’t know what Ethernet is do you..?? This isn’t residential service, this is service to major businesses. Over the next few years the telecoms are going to eventually drop out of offering service to people in the middle of nowhere…I understand your frustration but the telephone industry isn’t regulated anymore, they no longer have to provide service like they once had to. On the other hand are you as mad at the cable companies for not offering service to you at all vs the subpar service you receive from centurylink? I mean you could be getting what comcast, infinity, time warner or “insert you local cable company here” is offering you=NOTHING.