BROWSING: CenturyLink

Lumen’s attention now turns to reaching 'more customers with maximum efficiency,' said the CEO Lumen Technologies on Monday announced that it’s closed its $7.5 billion sale of its Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier (ILEC) business operating in 20 states to Brightspeed.  With the Brightspeed sale behind it,...

Lumen will sell CenturyLink-branded assets to Apollo across 20 states and retain those in 16 states Lumen Technologies has agreed to sell a portion of its incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) operations to Apollo Global Management for $7.5 billion. Lumen will retain the CenturyLink-branded assets in 16...

Happy Valentine’s Day from Charlotte/ Davidson/ Lake Norman, NC.  We have prepared a very special issue this week for both President’s Day and Valentine’s Day holidays.  Because it’s a long weekend, we took the liberty to slightly increase the length of this week’s Brief.  A...

Centurylink is rebranding itself as an enterprise-focused business named Lumen Technologies and positioning its offerings as a global platform for Industry 4.0. "With Lumen, we are reinventing and repositioning the company to deliver on a brand new promise: To further human progress through technology," said...

In this age of sweeping digitalization and ubiquitous connectivity, enterprises face a constantly-changing set of challenges. Flexibility, responsiveness and product differentiation are imperatives and delivering dynamic, impactful services will determine winners and losers in this data-driven economy. A mega-trend that informs the trajectory of...

CenturyLink announced this week that it has won a $1.6 billion network services contract with the U.S. Department of the Interior, to support IT modernization for the federal agency's enterprise network, covering areas including SD-WAN, network security and Wi-Fi access. The Department of the Interior...

Network operators CenturyLink and West Safety Communications have settled with the Federal Communications Commission over violations of FCC rules due to a 911 service outage. The two companies agreed to pay $575,000 in fines and put in place a three-year compliance and reporting plan to...

IoT, AI and machine learnings are key edge computing use cases, CenturyLink says There widespread consensus that edge computing will be a key piece of opening up latency-sensitive 5G applications like autonomous vehicles and augmented and virtual reality. Where there's not widespread consensus is around...

Cellular-satellite start-up UbiquitiLink, which aims to connect regular cellular phones via a netowrk of low-earth-orbit nanosatellites, raised a second round of seed funding this week, snagging $5.2 million and bringing its total raised to $12 million. UbiquitiLink said that the money will speed up...

We’ve been hearing more and more about 5G wireless pay TV, but when will it come to market? It started several years ago when the wireless world was all about 4G. AT&T DirecTV NOW started the whole ball rolling. Verizon seeing the success of...

The realization that gigabit (and beyond) broadband speeds will be the baseline enabler of the Fourth Industrial revolution has private equity’s attention, which might kick off another round of carrier M&A. The idea of broadband service as a fourth utility (i.e., alongside gas, electricity and...

Fiber is fuel for both LTE and future "5G" systems, and service providers are doing their best to increase their fiber footprints. Here are three fiber trends to watch:  Both residential and enterprise fiber access is on the upswing. SNL Kagan found earlier this year...

Anti-trust approval clears the way for the $34B deal to close CenturyLink received anti-trust approval from the Federal Communications Commission on Monday for its $34 billion purchase of Level 3 Communications. CenturyLink had been steadily winding its way through the necessary state-level approvals and received...

CenturyLink private cloud service receives an upgrade with VMware Cloud Foundation CenturyLink, Inc. recently updated its private cloud service, Dedicated Cloud Compute (DCC) Foundation, to a private service based on VMware Cloud Foundation. The cloud service gives companies the option of switching to a hybrid-cloud that...

CenturyLink’s Managed Hybrid SD-WAN eases transition to next-generation networks CenturyLink launched its Managed Hybrid Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) Tuesday, a set of WAN packages that improve traffic flow across both broadband internet connection and private multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) networks. SD-WAN is a software-defined networking...

CenturyLink has gained formal approvals from Virginia and Minnesota for its $34 billion acquisition of fiber provider Level 3, with those states joining more than a dozen others that have cleared the way for the merger of the two companies to go through. Whether the merger...

Support for the central office re-architected as a data center design continues to grow, but what the connection between CORD efforts and 5G? On this week’s “NFV/SDN Reality Check,” we speak with Radisys on the connection between the telecommunication industry’s move...

Google Fiber plans in flux; 5G progress and standards challenges; and M&A activity highlight final round of RCR Wireless News top 100 stories of 2016. Editor’s Note: Before we turn the page on 2016, we thought we would take a look back...

5 things to know today ... 1. Google said Sprint will be the first carrier to launch enhanced text messaging for Android phones. Sprint will use GSMA's universal rich communication services profile. For the past year, Google has been working with various mobile operators to...

$25 billion merger of fiber providers geared toward delivering connectivity and digital services to enterprise customers Confirming widespread speculation, CenturyLink today announced plans to acquire Level 3 in a cash and stock transaction worth $25 billion, according to the companies. If approved, the combined operations will own...

The telecom industry is awash in merger talk at the moment, continuing a wave of consolidation that is seeing service providers complement delivery networks with content holdings, and has trickled down to the entire vendor ecosystem as high-capital costs coupled with declining revenues set...

Verizon Wireless has recently started advertising its new One Talk plan. This sounds good and I and hope it will be successful for the carrier. It will be attractive to a slice of its business customer pie. One Talk lets users get phone calls on their office phone...

CenturyLink launched a new offering at Cisco Live that leverages Wi-Fi location analytics for the enterprise in combination with Cisco access points. The new Wi-Fi analytics service was announced at Cisco Live in Las Vegas. CenturyLink described the solution as a fully managed offering that relies on Cisco...

Alaska’s GCI joins Sprint, T-Mobile and others paying a fine to the FCC tied to 911 service outages The Federal Communications Commission continues to ding telecom operators for 911 service issues, with the latest involving Alaska-based carrier General Communications. The FCC levied a $2.4 million fine...