Will CenturyTel Acquire Qwest and Become the Next Big Baby Bell?
CenturyTel and Qwest announced their intention to merge. Why is that a big deal? Well among other things, that suddenly means a very small company will suddenly become a large Baby Bell like AT&T and Verizon. Will that work? First a bit of history. In 1984 the giant AT&T was broken up by the US Government into one big national long distance giant called AT&T and seven Baby Bells which offered local phone service around the country mostly to larger and mid size cities. There were also several hundred smaller local phone companies in smaller markets around the country. In the mid 1990’s the seven started to merge. Today AT&T and Verizon are giant Baby Bells that each cover roughly half the US market. Qwest is the third and smaller one. It is still the same size it was when AT&T was originally broken up. It was US West, but about a decade ago changed names and added long distance. CenturyTel was one of the very small local phone companies, not a larger Baby Bell. They are now changing the
