Shareholders of both companies have approved the acquisition of Qwest by CenturyLink. Shareholder meetings were held today in both Monroe, La (CenturyLink) and Denver, Co (Qwest). Interestingly enough, exactly 97% of the votes cast by both (but separate) shareholder groups approved the transaction.
Shareholder approval is but one step in a multi-step process before the transaction can close. The U.S. Department of Justice and seven out of 21 states have already approved the deal. That leaves 14 states left to approve, as well as the FCC’s blessing.
The companies expect the deal to close in the first half of 2011. Upon completion, Qwest will become a subsidiary of CenturyLink. As of June 30, 2010, the two companies served approximately 5.2 million broadband customers, 16.2 million access lines, 1.5 million video subscribers and nearly one million wireless customers in 37 states. The combined company will also have 180K route miles of fiber transport and will employ 49K people (that is until the cost saving cuts begin).
Interesting times, to be sure. Wonder whether CenturyLink will try to wall out competitors on its networks even more than Qwest is doing now; if I recall correctly CenLink costs a bit more for T1 and other dedicated access loops versus Qwest. Then again, that was probably the plan all along.
Also, now that CenLink will have Qwest under its belt, the company will be able to charge Tier 1 rates for intern…actually, never mind, Tier 1 internet rates are low. They'll be able to charge QWEST rates for deidcated internet access pipes. Which get kinda spendy..
FWIW Qwest has FINALLY decided to deploy something above standard ADSL to my town of ~16k (Golden, CO). Some places for one reason or another can't get the higher speeds, but people are seeing 12M down, 869k up as an option where 7M or less was available before. Still not as good as Comcast's standard 12/2 tier, but a bit cheaper.
Hopefully the new CenLink + Qwest can provide enough competition to Comcast in the Denver area that Comcast will keep upgrading their infrastructure. Comcast has upped the speeds of their Blast tier by 4 Mbps down and as much as 2 mbps up in some parts of their footprint but not here…despite the fact that I'd py $10 more per month for the increased speeds but not for the current ones.