CenturyLink To Buy Level 3 For $34 Billion, Create a More Formidable Competitor To AT&T (bloomberg.com)

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.

Comments

We need more competition, not less.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We need more competition, not less.

[EvilSS]

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.

Re:We need more competition, not less.

[Shatrat]

AT&T and TW do not compete. Centurylink and Level3 do not compete (for residential service).

Re:More like a formidable competitor to competitio

[Tablizer]

The USA allows natural monopolies as a practicable matter, where alternatives wouldn't make sense due to the capital/resource requirements.

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

[cdrudge]

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.

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.