CenturyTel-Qwest Combo: Where’s the Wireless?
CenturyTel Inc., the fifth-largest local telecom in the US, is buying Qwest Communications International Inc., the third largest, in a $10.6 billion stock swap deal designed to let the combined company be a big fish in an ever-shrinking pond. But where’s the wireless and broadband strategy? Here’s some analysis.
Assuming the deal goes through, the CenturyTel-Qwest hybrid will have 18 million phone lines in 37 states, but they’ll still have absolutely zero wireless network services. That’s a bad statistic when the number of landlines out there is getting smaller and smaller as customers go to cable company phone service or simply use their cell phone a lot more.
It’s also noteworthy that CenturyTel is going to acquire $11.8 million of former Baby Bell Qwest’s debt in the deal, which is going to put them on even worse footing. An Associated Press report says that CenturyTel’s post-merger strategy will to shore up their business by selling more broadband services to businesses, and possibly even selling TV services to cable.
Both companies combined have a massive customer footprint. But I can’t help feeling like without that critical cell phone and wireless data market, AT&T and Verizon are just going to keep on trouncing them.
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CenturyTel services my local area, and if you are an MSP who works with Qwest, don’t get too excited: CenturyTel is the worst vendor I’ve ever been forced to work with. That’s right, where I live, we are on a CenturyTel fiber network, and can only use their services. I’ve had my MSP’s business internet access go out for days and nearly a week at a time. I’ve had my static IP address lost for 10 days, and nobody knew what a static IP address was, and wouldn’t let me speak with a manager. I’ve had their technicians disconnect a neighboring businesses phone lines when doing an install that were clearnly labeled, and hook them up to my clients, wrong phone numbers and all.
They also are very guarded about giving out any contact information that isn’t their 1-800 number. As a local MSP, I often will identify a regional problem, but have no inside management contacts, and the problem is often too confusing or beyond the scope of expertise for the guy at the 1-800 number.
Oh yeah, add that to the fact that most of my town actually has a reverse DNS entry somewhere pointing to my domain name, and they can’t figure out how to fix it.
Of all the companies I’ve worked with, CenturyTel as an MSP vendor gets an F-. They are also dabbling with offering their own MSP services…