Level 3 (was: "legacy" Wiltel/Looking Glass bandwidth)

[Deepak Jain <deepak () ai net>]

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