Say Goodbye To Qwest-Say Hello To the 80s.

I was in Denver in 1988 working for the Denver Nuggets. US West was the telco and a few years later they became Qwest. The company had a lot of vision and big ideas. Of the major telcos back then Qwest with their CyberCenters and fiber network that was built out along side the same routes and train tracks as Level3 were going to change the way we all communicated. And, like so many companies with big ideas, something went wrong.

Now Qwest is about to become a distant memory, faded like a dream, as they merge into Century Link, a rapidly growing clone of AT&T that's coming out of the South. Don't be fooled by the marketing messages. This is a banker driven M&A deal at the core. So while the promises of better this and that make the rounds, know that jobs will be cut, and service levels reduced. The same will occur with the AT&T/T-Mobile merger and in reality we'll be back to where we were in the 80's before the Bell System was broken up. Back then we had AT&T and GTE. Well I'd contend that we really have that now, other than Verizon but if you put Verizon and Century Link together, well, there you go.. AT&T and GTE.

The difference is the cable operators and their ability to change the game. If I was in the FCC I'd be doing all I could to get the cable MSO's into mobile, and fast. They're the equalizers. The approaches they are taking are radical compared to the telcos and they have the customer bases to rapidly grow in wireless with the Quad-Play..so I say, make it more than just foreplay.....get out their and really begin to be competitive.

Related articles

• CenturyLink completes $12.2B acquisition of Qwest (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• FCC OKs Qwest-CenturyLink merger (bizjournals.com)

Comments

[Tmissner]

Oh - and don't forget that GTE spawned Verizon

[Tmissner]

Very sad day for Denver telco, once the hub of the future with MCI ( CO Sprngs ), TCI ( John Malone ), US West ( ILEC ), QWEST, Level(3), 360 Networks ( before their business model drastically changed when funding dried up ) and all ancillary telco services and other related startups. Now what's left, Level(3), who is barely hanging on and a few smaller VoIP companies like Intelepeer and 360. I guess the Broncos will now play in CenturyLink stadium at Mile High?
Like many I left Denver for good 5 years ago. I look back on the mid 90s to early 2000's fondly.

-- T.R.