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 will pass muster with federal regulators remains to be seen, but CenturyLink says that it is on track to complete the merger by the end of the September. The acquisition was announced in October.
Louisiana-based CenturyLink offers cloud and IT services designed to leverage its domestic fiber and international transport network. Level 3 is a major backbone provider also focused on enterprise connectivity and managed services, which operates in 60 countries on three continents.
The combined company would connect more than 350 metropolitan areas and about 75,000 on-network buildings, and boost’s CenturyLink’s existing 200,000 route miles of fiber and increase its on-net building count by about 75%, according to the company’s original merger announcement.
The two companies plan to focus on the enterprise market once they are combined, aiming to offer “enterprise and wholesale customers a broader and more complementary range of services and solutions, and … enable the advanced technology and growing bandwidth needs of its customers.”
CenturyLink is shifting its focus to its fiber network and is funding the purchase of Level 3 in part by selling its data centers. At the beginning of May, CenturyLink closed on the sale of 57 data centers to a consortium of private equity funds for $1.86 billion plus a 10% stake in a newly formed data center infrastructure company Cyxtera Technologies. CenturyLink retained its hosting and cloud assets, and CenturyLink CEO and President Glen Post said at the time that the sale of the data centers “allows CenturyLink to drive greater focus on our network infrastructure while still having the ability to sell colocation services in [the] data centers.”
