Big Changes Coming at CenturyLink?

There are rumors out there this weekend that CenturyLink is about to shake itself up in a big way this coming week. According to a  now-retracted internal email that is making the rounds out there, it goes something like this:

CenturyLink’s Mass Markets group may either be sold or spun off, and will take the name/brand with it. The Enterprise/Business/Federal groups will be re-branded, apparently as ‘Lumen’ or something similar. And the fiber side of things might get its own name too, with the name ‘Quantum’ coming up. Just how any of this would work in practice is an open question, i.e. are we merely looking at separate business units under the same umbrella or something more permanent and drastic? I have no idea, but something is clearly up.

Such a move would make sense to the part of the industry that prefers focused entities to larger, complex organizations when it comes to services, networks, and infrastructure.  . It would also seem to partially undo the Level 3 merger, sort of like what GTT is doing with Interoute/Hibernia yet different and on a broader scale.

But it could be more akin to Zayo’s announcement a year and a half ago that it was doing this same sort of thing. They didn’t of course, what it actually meant in practice was that they were for sale — which is what happened 6 months later.  Could an infrastructure fund swoop in and buy CenturyLink too?  The money is out there.

And it could even all be hogwash and the supposed email a hoax.  You know, fake news being all the rage these days.  I suppose we’ll have to wait and see, but I suspect we won’t have to wait long…  Any thoughts?  Leave a comment below.

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Categories: Fiber Networks · Mergers and Acquisitions