CenturyLink in Advanced Talks to Merge With Level 3 Communications - Interweb is doomed

OH BOY! Omaha Taxpayers get to replace all the BGSs for their party venue boondoggle. Again.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/CenturyLink+Center+Omaha/@41.2623782,-95.9281322,19z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xe896a8b5037ce4d0!8m2!3d41.2624226!4d-95.9282445

lol

This is great! Except for all of their mutual customers who had circuits from both for redundancy. (See also: Level 3's and TWTC's mutual customers, and probably a long list of other M&A I'm not thinking of off-hand.)

OK, I lied about it being great anyway.

      Jima

So if this went through, how would it happen? Does 3356 (L3) absorb 209's
(CL) infrastructure and slowly make customers change their peering config
to hit 3356 instead?

You make a good point, I have at least a couple clients that peer to both
providers for redundancy. One of which just recently signed an agreement
with CenturyLink for the sole purpose of fail over.

Re: CenturyLink in Advanced Talks to Merge With Level 3 Communications -
Interweb is doomed

:slight_smile:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/centurylink-in-advanced-talks-to-merge-with-level-3-communications-1477589011

This is great! Except for all of their mutual customers who had circuits
from both for redundancy. (See also: Level 3's and TWTC's mutual
customers, and probably a long list of other M&A I'm not thinking of
off-hand.)

OK, I lied about it being great anyway.

      Jima

Level3 hasn't even finished migrating its TWTelecom customers to the L3 AS yes, and it's been years. So I don't think you can expect any faster transition for CL.

-mel beckman

And I'm sure it would go about as well as the TW integration went. Level3 is currently having issues, we lost BGP just a bit ago and also legacy voice trunks have been down since first thing this morning.

Level3 hasn't even finished migrating its TWTelecom customers to the L3 AS yes, and it's been years. So I don't think you can expect any faster transition for CL.

3549 still exists...

Savvis 3561 still exists on Centurylink's side too. 6 networks down to 1
... How much of that fiber for each network was running in the same conduit
to begin with anyway?

Centurylink
Qwest
Savvis

Level3
Global Crossing
TWTC

We were on on 4323 - we are still peered to 4323 (from a config stand
point) - but the world sees us thru 3549

It is a mess on convergence

It's funny you should mention that. I just learned that our CL traffic rides on a single lambda is a Level3 fiber. Oddly, though, the cost to buy that same circuit directly from Level3 is twice as high.

Which bodes ill for circuit pricing in the reduced-competition environment following the merger. A similar thing happened to us when L3 bought TWT. In both cases L3 says "but you're getting such a better network!" Alas, that turned out to be not the case with the TWT acquisition, as merger mishaps caused numerous outages.

-mel