Level 3

Wed Jul 8 13:30:39 UTC 2009

To boot almost all the original Telcove crew we had are gone.  They're 
losing the better people through attrition as they're frustrated at not 
being able to help their customers.  I also have a feeling Level3 makes 
changes during business hours that are not announced.  I have no proof 
but I have a feeling due to some odd changes in routing I see every now 
and then.

Shane Ronan wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>
>