The story
The earliest predecessor of Lumen was the Oak Ridge Telephone Company in Oak Ridge, Louisiana, which was owned by F. E. Hogan Sr. In 1930, Hogan sold the company, with 75 paid subscribers, to William Clarke and Marie Williams, for $500. In 1946, Clarke McRae Williams received ownership of the family's telephone company as a wedding gift. Clarke purchased the Marion Telephone Company and eventually made it his base of operation as he grew his company through more acquisitions. The company remained as a family-operated business until it became incorporated in 1968. It went public in 1978.
1967–1999
By 1967, Oak Ridge Telephone Company served three states with 10,000 access lines. That year, the company was incorporated as Central Telephone and Electronics. Clarke M. Williams served as president and chairman of the board.
In 1971, the company was renamed Century Telephone Enterprises, Inc. In 1972, Century Telephone acquired the La Crosse Telephone Corporation, of Wisconsin. This began a multi-decade spree of acquisitions which grew the size of the company. The company went public in 1978 on the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1985, Century Telephone sold several subsidiaries to Colonial Telephone for $4.66 million.
In 1987, the stock price rapidly increased from its low that year, before dropping in the 1987 stock market crash. Earnings grew each year from their 1983 low, and by 1987 they reached nearly US$20 million.
From 1991 to 1995 the company continued its acquisition strategy which added tens of thousand of phone lines and grew the long term debt from $205 million to $602 million with $115 million in annual net income. By 1995 it was the 16th largest communications company in the United States with over 3000 employees. Two hundred employees were unionized through the Communications Workers of America.
In 1997 the company bought Pacific Telecom for $1.5 billion. This acquisition added 1.9 million cell lines to Century's network and nearly doubled the size of the company. After the acquisition Century's network served 21 states and 2 million customers. The company sold off some of its telephone assets to smaller competitors for hundreds of millions of dollars.
2000s
In 2000, the company acquired 490,000 telephone lines from Verizon for $1.5 billion. It then sold "substantially all" of its wireless business to Alltel for $1.59 billion in 2002. Through 2002 the company grew to nearly 7000 employees with approximately 1500 of them organized in various unions. At this time the company had about $800 million in net income and $3.6 billion in debt.
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In 2003 the company acquired Digital Teleport ($39 million) which then formed some of its main assets and expanded the company's fiber network offering. By 2004, CenturyTel was the eighth largest local telephone provider in the United States. In this time it paid down its long term debt to $2.7 billion and its net income fell to $337 million annually. In 2005, CenturyTel began offering satellite television services. In 2007, CenturyTel acquired NC-based CLEC Madison River Communications which was also the parent company of four ILEC operations in NC (MebTel), GA (Coastal Communications), AL (GulfTel Communications) and IL (Gallatin River Communications). Also in 2007, a "workforce reduction" resulted in 600 employees laid-off as well as receiving $336 million in Federal and State subsidy. CenturyTel received an additional $333 million the previous year. Most of these funds were received through the "High Cost Support Loop" program. From 2004 to 2007 CenturyTel repurchased approximately $2 billion in shares.
2008 merger with Embarq and name change to CenturyLink
On October 27, 2008, Embarq announced that it would be acquired by CenturyTel, Inc. in an all-stock transaction valued at about $6 billion. CenturyTel's CEO Glen Post would remain CEO of the merged company following the acquisition, and remained CEO until 2018. Embarq was the former landline business of Sprint and served cities in 18 states, including Nevada, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. The deal made CenturyTel the third-largest landline phone provider in Pennsylvania behind Verizon (through both Verizon Pennsylvania and Verizon North) and Comcast. On June 2, 2009, a press release announced that the combined CenturyTel/Embarq entity would be called CenturyLink. Denver-based Monigle Associates was retained to formulate the new brand strategy. The acquisition was completed on July 1, 2009.
On October 19, 2009, CenturyTel and Embarq brandings were retired, and all business was officially conducted under the CenturyLink banner, continuing to trade on the NYSE under the CenturyTel stock ticker CTL. The new corporate name, CenturyLink, Inc., did not become official until May 2010.
2010 merger with Qwest
On April 22, 2010, CenturyLink (at this point still legally known as CenturyTel, Inc.) announced it would acquire Qwest in a stock-for-stock transaction. Under the agreement, CenturyLink would swap 0.1664 of its shares for each share of Qwest; as a result, CenturyLink shareholders prior to the merger wound up with 50.5% share of ownership in the combined company, while former Qwest shareholders gained the remaining 49.5%. The valuation of CenturyLink's purchase was $12 billion. The merger was completed on April 1, 2011.
After the merger, CenturyLink became the largest landline provider in the state of Colorado as well as the third largest telecom company in the US. At the time, the new company had 17 million access lines, 5 million broadband customers, and 1.4 million video subscribers across 37 states. Additionally, the acquisition meant CenturyLink would become owner of Former Regional Bell Operating Company, US West, due to Qwest's purchase of the company in the year 2000.
Further acquisitions 2011–2019
In July 2011, CenturyLink acquired Savvis, Inc., a global provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT services for $2 billion, which represented all outstanding shares of Savvis common stock at $40 per share. This acquisition allowed CenturyLink to provide expanded managed hosting and cloud services. In October 2012, Savvis acquired the ITO Business Division of Ciber, which added managed services to their business. By December, CenturyLink launched Savvisdirect an expansion of CenturyLink's portfolio of Savvis cloud services for small businesses, IT administrators, and developers. In June 2013, Savis acquired AppFog, a Portland-based Platform as a Service provider. In November CenturyLink acquired Tier 3 a Seattle-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform, and provider of advanced cloud management. However, Tier 3 became part of CenturyLink Cloud rather than Savvis. At the time, Tier 3 operated nine data centers in the Seattle region while Savvis operated 55. CenturyLink planned to build out two to four new datacenters in 2014. The CTO of Tier3, Jared Wray, took the CenturyLink Cloud CTO position after the acquisition. SavvisDirect was retired in 2014 as part of an internal consolidation of CenturyLink's cloud service offerings.
On December 8, 2014, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of DataGardens, Inc., a Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) provider based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
On December 11, 2014, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of Cognilytics, a 200-employee predictive analytics company.
On March 30, 2016, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of netAura, a security services company that focuses on cybersecurity, security information and event management (SIEM), and vulnerability management that typically works with government customers.
On October 31, 2016, CenturyLink announced its intent to acquire Level 3 Communications in a deal valued at around $25 billion. After securing the necessary regulatory approvals, CenturyLink closed the transaction on November 1, 2017. This acquisition can now be viewed as a takeover from the inside. Level3 shareholders would only approve the deal if CenturyLink retired their CFO and eventually CEO. Eventually all former CenturyLink executives would be replaced by former Level3 managers leaving only HR and legal executives in place.
On January 9, 2017, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of Edison, New Jersey–based SEAL Consulting, a SAP services provider. CenturyLink ended 2017 with $1.3 billion in net income.
By the end of 2018, CenturyLink had $35 billion in long term debt. It determined it had overestimated the value of its goodwill and wrote down a $2.7 billion loss. This resulted in a $1.7 billion loss in net income for 2018.
In 2018 along with 91 additional Fortune 500 companies it had "paid an effective federal tax rate of 0% or less" as a result of Donald Trump´s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
On September 10, 2019, CenturyLink announced the acquisition of Streamroot, a provider of technology to improve video and static content delivery within bandwidth constrained areas.
2020 name change to Lumen
On September 14, 2020, CenturyLink, Inc announced that it had changed its name to Lumen Technologies, Inc. Effective with the opening of the trading day on September 18, 2020, the company stock ticker changed from CTL to LUMN. The CenturyLink brand will continue to be the customer-facing brand for traditional copper-based services. Fiber-based products and services use the brand Quantum Fiber.
2021 to present
On August 3, 2021, Lumen announced it would sell its incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) operations in 20 states to Apollo Global Management for $7.5 billion. Lumen structured the deal to retain their infrastructure in urban and suburban areas which they still wanted to upgrade from copper to fiber and sell-off areas that they deemed unworthy of further investment. Lumen retained ILEC operations in 16 states, mostly the operations formerly served by Qwest. The sale closed in October 2022; the sold ILEC operations were rebranded as Brightspeed.
Lumen has won multiple government contracts. Throughout 2021, it won a managed network service contract with United States Postal Service and a connectivity contract with US Army Recruiting and the US Navy Judge Advocate General Corps.
The company continued to have difficulty generating profit in 2022. The executives divided the company into "Growth", "Nurture", "Harvest" sections, which correspond to high, low, and very-low/negative margins. The goal was to move customers from Nurture to Grow products and to sell off the Harvest products. Landline sales continued to fall but Lumen focused on growing the profitable fiber services. This led to the $2.7 billion sale of its Latin American business which was rebranded as Cirion.
In 2023, a deal was signed with Colt Technology Services in which Lumen EMEA, its subsidiary serving the Europe, Middle East, and Africa enterprise markets, would be sold to Colt for $1.8 billion. The deal allows Lumen to continue serving multinational enterprise customers via Colt's infrastructure.
In May 2025, Lumen announced an agreement to sell 95% of Quantum Fiber, its mass markets consumer fiber business operating in 11 U.S. states, to AT&T for $5.75 billion. The sale closed on February 2, 2026, in which the service was rebranded to "Quantum Fiber from AT&T".
In May 2026, Lumen announced it would be acquiring networking software company Alkira for $475 million.
From Wikipedia’s article on Lumen Technologies, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7