USW will still own $2.3B of GBLX, or around 9% of the company before its merger with FRO.
Thanks for the clarification.
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Thread: I must admit being a bit surprised by today's neutral-to-negative reaction to the merger announcement. There seems to have been a good deal of institutional buying of QWST today (http://www.thomsoninvest.net/iwatch/cgi-bin/iw_page), but, in general, investors didn't seem to buy into the rosy picture of the new QWST painted yesterday by the principals.
In one of the stories from the Denver papers that I linked this morning, there was this statement from an analyst that might indicate a more general attitude.
"As someone who has followed Qwest, this is the biggest bet yet," said analyst Tom Friedberg of Janco Partners. "It's incredibly risky, and we won't know for years whether or not Qwest will be able to reform the most backward of the Bell operating companies."
That's an odd statement, given the portrait of USWest painted by Nacchio and Trujillo. I'd love to know why the analyst considers it "the most backward" of RBOCs. Unfortunately the statement wasn't persued by the reporter, and since but since I can't ask him about it, I'll ask the thread:
Is it fair to call USW 'backward' compared to other RBOCs?
As a customer, I know all about their service problems. It's enough to let them earn the nickname "US Worst". It's a major problem, but not the kind of thing that's covered by the term "backward".
A couple of things seem to argue against that description:
They have one of the most (if not the most) modern wireless networks among the RBOCs. They got it by selling off their original and dated network to Airtouch and then collecting PCS licences for the major cities they serve. It's not a big network, but it certainly doesn't seem to be "backward".
They've had an extensive DSL roll-out in place for over a year, beating the cable operators to the broadband market in many of their service areas. (And even getting a lock on the market in Portland, OR where they lobbied heavily for the "open-access" ruling.) It's priced competitively with cable-modem service and far below Covad's competing residential DSL.
They run a large and generally efficient dial-up and DSL ISP that's highly competitive and heavily advertised. They even have a free email service for non-customers.
They also seem to do a good job of marketing bundled services.
What are the other companies doing that makes US West seem "backward"? |
