The Local newsletter is your free, daily guide to life in Colorado. For locals, by locals. Sign up today!
The situation looks rather bleak for Qwest Communications International. The phone company, which is being acquired by CenturyLink for about $10 billion, continues to lose profits as fewer people find the need for home phones in the era of smart phones. Second-quarter profits were down by 25 percent, according to Bloomberg.
If you’ve had your television on or opened your mailbox lately, you probably know that Qwest is promoting its high-speed Internet service. The reason, Bloomberg writes, is to offset losses of home-phone customers—a similar strategy to that of CenturyLink.
That's only $1 per issue!
The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune notes that Louisiana-based CenturyLink is about half the size of Qwest, and Qwest’s small competitors are questioning CenturyLink’s financial strength and technical expertise in running a 14-state telephone network while also promising to cut $575 million in costs.
While CenturyLink says it can handle the transition, Qwest CEO Ed Mueller says Qwest isn’t just a phone company: “We’re a broadband company and we mean it” (via the Denver Business Journal). Qwest has extended fiber-optic cables to five million households across its service turf, Mueller adds.