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
