Insight on L3/ Broadwing

Fri Oct 12 15:42:41 UTC 2007

I am a smug Telcove weenie (customer) who has been watching the  
integration of Telcove into the L3 Borg with satisfaction, as network  
connectivity has gotten better and even their billing system seems to  
be slowly improving over time.

Meanwhile have come to expect that almost any "Level3" issue raised  
on nanog will be on the Broadwing side.

Apparently L3 honcho Kevin O'Hara  seems to feel the same way:

===================
(question from
Greg Mesniaeff - Needham & Co.)

Q. Thanks. Just made it. A quick question for Kevin, regarding the  
OSS integration challenges that you referred to, are any of them in  
any way tied to any recent changes in pricing and in volume dynamics,  
or put differently, what explains the lag between when you've made  
some of these acquisitions and now that these issues have come to the  
floor?

Kevin O'Hara answers:

A. Yeah. There's one word that describes it; it's called Broadwing.  
All of the previous WilTel and Level 3 were in a very similar  
business and we -- they had superior capabilities to us for voice, so  
we effectively opted into their capabilities there.

We opted into the Level 3 capabilities for most other areas. So the  
integration there, even in the interim, was pretty straightforward,  
we didn't put much stress on it. For the metro companies, they were  
at various stages of maturity from a system and process standpoint,  
but none of them had sufficient scale to really kind of create a lot  
of stress.

Broadwing had sufficient scale, was sufficiently different, and we're  
introducing sufficient number of changes, particularly trying to get  
the legacy Broadwing selling to on-net services, taking the Broadwing  
customers and integrating them into Level 3 systems. It was just the  
scale of Broadwing relative to where we were in the overall  
implementation of our end state architecture.

We are too far along to opt into their systems and our systems  
weren't far enough along to make that transition smooth, which is  
what's caused us to operate in this hybrid environment.
===================

Source:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/49542-level-3-communications-q2-2007- 
earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo

--Patrick