When Did Centurylink Become Lumen?
One of the largest telecommunication businesses in the United States, Lumen Technologies closed the CenturyLink brand and rebranded under a new identity in 2020, therefore uniting under a single name. For the corporation, this was a significant change; yet, it occurred after years of acquisitions and expansion that propelled it into other spheres of telecommunication services beyond simple landline phone services.
CenturiesLink's History The history of CenturyLink starts in the 1930s when the Oak Ridge Telephone Company opened its doors in Louisiana. Using a mergers and acquisition approach, this little phone firm has grown over the years. Among the noteworthy events that have shaped CenturyLink's evolution are
- 1968 – The Oak Ridge Telephone Company and the Century Telephone Enterprises join together. This leads to the formation of Century Telephone as a telecommunications company offering local and long-distance telephone services.
- 1971 - Century Telephone enters the New York Stock Exchange and gets the symbol CTL.
- 1993 – Century Telephone entered a period of consolidation, buying many small Local Exchange Carriers (LECS) across the United States. This includes the acquisition of Pacific Telecom which was done in the year 1997.
- 2009 – The company which was earlier known as CenturyTel got involved in the acquisition of EMBARQ. This acquisition also helped it to increase significantly its high-speed internet subscriber count.
- 2010 – This is when the company decides to revert to CenturyLink to ensure that all services being offered are under the same brand in the United States.
- 2011 – CenturyLink thus performs one of the biggest acquisitions of Qwest Communications. At this point, Qwest was offering services in 37 states within the United States of America.
- 2017 – CenturyLink acquires Level 3 Communications. Level 3 was a major international telecommunication company that had a large IP transit network. This increases CenturyLink's capacity by a huge margin notably in the area of business network services.
Over the years, it evolved from a regional telephone company through mergers and acquisitions to become one of the largest telecommunications companies in the United States. As of the late 2010s, it has over 11 million broadband subscribers and provides a diverse range of telephone, Internet, and network services to consumers and enterprises in 37 states.
The Formation of Lumen Technologies Following the large acquisition of Level 3 Communications increased CenturyLink's IP and cloud services dramatically, after this CenturyLink began to market itself more as a technology and network services company as opposed to a more conventional telephone company. It began to refer to itself in terms of technology solutions in the earnings material and highlighted how its fiber optic internet services placed it ahead of competitors in terms of speed.
Last but not least, in September 2020, the company formally stated that it was going through the renaming process and would be called Lumen Technologies from then on. Lumen would center on next-generation network solutions for enterprise business consumers and assist organizations to orchestrate their data and applications in complex deployed settings, such as multi-cloud.
The name Lumen was chosen because the company wanted to be seen as the provider of the services that would allow the business to ‘see’ all that was potentially possible from all the data. The slogan for the Lumen launch was The Platform of Amazing Things and was meant to illustrate how Lumen unlocked data.
The transition to Lumen was the final step in CenturyLink’s evolution from its roots as a landline telephone company. Its fiber internet network that reached hundreds of thousands of miles worldwide now links smart devices at the edge and lets it deliver the next generation of cloud and security services. Lumen was now ready to be seen as a technology enabler for such things as 5G, IoT AI, etc.
Although consumer broadband is still a significant market for Lumen, the company views the next wave of growth in securely enabling massive amounts of data that enterprise and government customers exchange between their many locations and public multi-clouds. Through its unique global network infrastructure and cloud-optimized software-defined networking strengths, Lumen offers these integrated hybrid network solutions as an edge computing powerhouse.
The Lumen rebranding in 2020 signified the new CenturyLink after years of evolution through acquisition and merger. Originally, it started as a regional phone company in the 1930s and now it provides fiber infrastructure, edge computing, advanced networking, and cloud solutions and services based on virtualization and automation technologies. Lumen has decided to change the new name and the brand because the company is more focused on the digital network that it sees as a competitive advantage to deliver outstanding technological solutions to clients.