It has taken a year and a day to jump through all the regulatory hoops, but the CenturyLink/Level 3 deal finally closed this morning. The $34B combination puts the combined company 51% in the hands of former CenturyLink shareholders and 49% in the hands of former Level 3 shareholders.
CenturyLink’s asset base now spans 450,000 route miles worldwide, 90,000 or so within 350 metro areas connecting more than 100,000 buildings with fiber. The company employs some 52,500 people and its revenues now stand at about $24B annually, about half of which is of the strategic enterprise variety.
Now the hard part begins – the integration. The expected synergies of $975M annually described in the initial announcement will take some time and elbow grease to derive, of course.
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Categories: Fiber Networks · ILECs, PTTs · Mergers and Acquisitions
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Now we all wait for the massive synergies created (layoffs) from this great merger!
I’m looking for Chicago-area sales\bizdev people. 🙂
I made a Google Fusion Table of the A and Z locations of the routes that Level 3 must divest.
https://www.google.com/fusiontables/DataSource?docid=1Sr265X-DdXb4kHGbHyp8V8XQQYD8C_U1lFOwNSYP
The shown routes aren’t the actual fiber routes, just driving routes between places, but it’s the best we’ve got that’s public at this time.
The long-haul “divestiture” is really an IRU on 24 strands of the stated routes – not the entire long-haul capacity. CTLevel3 will still own the majority of the fiber along those routes.
I had assumed as much was common knowledge and didn’t need repeating.
Wow, they should be forced to divest some assets North and South from Portland Oregon.
From PDX to SEA they now own both parts of the CenturyLink/Global Crossing route, the Level 3 “Classic” route, the Wiltel route, the TWTelecom cable in the “joint” route, etc… That is just too many paths and assets to be allowed to sit on. They should have been forced to divest.
Glad to see though that they have to divest some Eastbound fibers from PDX.
Now the innovation really begins!
….I had a hard time typing that without spewing my coffee on the screen.