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from the more-fiber-to-help-your-comms-stay-'regular' dept.
CenturyLink is buying Level 3 Communications:
CenturyLink Inc. agreed to buy Level 3 Communications Inc. for about $34 billion in cash and stock, creating a more formidable competitor to AT&T Inc. in the market to handle heavy internet traffic for businesses. [...] The equity value of the deal, excluding debt, is about $24 billion. Both companies have struggled against larger competitors -- AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. -- in the business services market. Investors sent CenturyLink shares down the most in 3 1/2 years on concern the company is overpaying and piling on debt to acquire a company whose sales growth has stagnated in a hotly competitive market.
The deal will give CenturyLink another 200,000 miles of fiber:
"This transaction increases CenturyLink's network by 200,000 route miles of fiber, which includes 64,000 route miles in 350 metropolitan areas and 33,000 subsea route miles connecting multiple continents," CenturyLink said. "Accounting for those served by both companies, CenturyLink's on-net buildings are expected to increase by nearly 75 percent to approximately 75,000, including 10,000 buildings in EMEA and Latin America." Currently, CenturyLink says it operates a "250,000-route-mile US fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network." Besides Internet access, CenturyLink offers cloud and managed hosting services for enterprises.
Also at The Wall Street Journal .
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 01 2016, @04:53PM
I, by contrast, am a democratic socialist, precisely because I think that socialism is a really effective tool for combating the problems that capitalism is particularly bad at dealing with, and is a tool we don't employ enough, at least in the United States. Among the problems that you didn't mention are the very clear market inefficiencies caused by monopolies and oligopolies, which are now extremely common as technology has improved, and similar inefficiencies caused in another direction by monopsonies and oligopsonies (where you have only a few buyers, instead of only a few sellers): Capitalism will tend to protect those situations with high barriers to entry and/or high economies of scale that outweigh any price advantage or quality improvement a new competitor might be able to provide.
In short, under pure capitalism, you are screwed over by your electric or phone company, and also screwed over by your employer if it's the only real source of jobs in town.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @05:34PM
The modern corporation came about through England, becoming intertwined with the monarchy. Do you think all the powerful rich folks just sat back and let corporations grab more and more power? No! They used it as a tool, and after our brief stint with "freedom" they are finally clamping down hard enough with their desire for power that we are seeing the facade crumble. The truly powerful "elite" have never disappeared, they are just chameleons that use whatever means at hand achieve their goals.