CenturyLink, based in Monroe, Louisiana is one of the USA’s largest telecommunications companies. The business provides telephone and internet services to the general public. It also offers a range of services to businesses, including security systems and cloud services.
The company was founded in 1930 and currently operates in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
CenturyLink formed through a series of takeovers and mergers, leading the 1930s Oak Ridge Telephone Company, through the formation of Century Telephone Enterprises in 1971 to a corporate name change upon the acquisition of Embarq in 2010, which was the official beginning of CenturyLink. Embarq was the largest local exchange telephone company other than the Baby Bell divisions of the USA’s original telephone monopoly.
In 2010, CenturyLink merged with Qwest with the combined company carrying the CenturyLink name. The new company was almost exactly half Qwest and half CenturyLink. Qwest was a merger of two companies in 2000. One of those was the US West, a former division of the Bell Telephone Company, which was created by the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor’s telephone company was created in 1885. The company changed its name to AT&T and in the 1980s it was deemed to be a monopoly and ordered to break up in the 1980s. US West was one of the fragments that came out of that breakup.
The main business of CenturyLink lies in its telephone network. It is the third-largest telephone company in the USA and also the third-largest internet provider.
As with most US telephone services, the company offers DSL internet services. DSL is more commonly advertised as ADSL. This is the classic internet type that people refer to as “broadband” CenturyLink provides internet to households and businesses in 39 states. The service is carried over a typical twisted copper wire telephone network.
CenturyLink began laying fiber optic cable in 2014. It offers both very high-speed internet and TV services over this network. The fiber internet system was first offered Omaha, Nebraska and it is now available in 17 states.
The backbone of the ADSL network has been updated to fiber optics in many states, using regular telephone wires from the local junction to each household. The company can improve that service on request by replacing that final stretch with fiber optic cable, creating an entire fiber-optic link.
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