Level 3 (was: "legacy" Wiltel/Looking Glass bandwidth)

Thu Jul 2 19:20:46 UTC 2009

I could not agree with the points below more.

Prior to the mergers, I had multiple services each with Looking Glass,  
Wiltel and Broadwing and Level3. After Level3's round of acquisitions  
the service level for all four of them went way down.

I've had the experience of not being able to resolve issues with  
Wiltel circuits because there was no techs available who could access  
the gear, been told they no longer wished to provide me with a Type 2  
service sold to me by Looking Glass or Broadwing, and had billing and  
implementation issues that have lasted almost two years with Level3,  
because they started moving services from one billing system to another.

Given that Level3's prices are usually not even close to competitive  
with solutions provided by other providers, I would suggest that  
people look elsewhere for reliable, reasonably priced services.

Shane

On Jul 2, 2009, at 2:50 PM, Deepak Jain wrote:

>
> Without continuing the L3 pile-on, one can easily glean from their  
> public filings that they have never properly filled out their  
> management depth in acquisition absorption and/or sufficiently  
> empowered those folks. The billions in revenue lost from  
> acquisitions like Genuity and others have told this story more than  
> once.
>
> L3 is not alone in this. Worldcomm's failure to integrate  
> acquisitions led to a much larger operational cash need than VZ has  
> shown for the same assets (verio, lots of other names here). This is  
> because VZ understands how traditional businesses acquire others,  
> better, in my opinion.
>
> Unfortunately, L3 has shown little interest in making the "real  
> world, tough business" cuts in heads and absorbing the real  
> (internal) pain of acquisitions and seems to have a pretty laissez- 
> faire attitude towards its customers, even at its senior management  
> levels (Cxx). I think this will be (and has been) the biggest  
> problem for them. Even a possible merger/JV with Sprint may not be  
> sufficient to solve that. Their resolution of billing disputes is  
> much more typical of WCOM than VZ.
>
> They are a big fish in lots, and lots, of markets. They enjoy being  
> able to dictate pricing in them. IMO, however, they don't have the  
> maturity of (say, AT&T or others) to take that big fish status and  
> leave you still happy with the service. (colloquially: if [good  
> companies] are going to take advantage, at least they don't make it  
> more painful than necessary).
>
> Operationally, where you have options (because of pricing, locality,  
> etc) it's long-term good to support competitors, diversity in  
> connectivity, etc. History has shown time and time again that when  
> an industry consolidates a lot of business with a certain vendor,  
> bad things can and do occur.
>
> Deepak Jain
> AiNET
>
>
>