What is your Qwest?

• Author: RUNDLES, JEFF
• Position: Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

ARE YOU SUGGESTING COCONUTS MIGRATE?

Mergers come and mergers go, but the acquisition about a month ago of US West by Qwest has to rank right up there with the strangest of all time. It wasn't a marriage of giants. You have a mid-sized Baby Bell and a relative newcomer to the telecommunications arena coming together to form a 90-some billion-dollar entity that remains, by global standards, a lightweight. And I truly believe that Qwest, by all accounts and track history a well-run and well-managed firm, got more liabilities than assets by absorbing US West.

I can't help thinking of great lines from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

"What is your quest?"

"I seek the Grail."

Clearly Qwest is after the Holy Grail, that being dominance in the global telecommunications field. By its officials' own admission, the dominant players in the field will be companies in the $500 billion to $1 trillion market-value arena. That means that US West, an acquisition valued at just under $50 billion, is at best a 10% step toward obtaining the Grail.

But what do you get with this small step? You get a company that is not just having service problems, but rather one that has inflicted a service nightmare on its (forced) constituency US West is -- make no mistake about it -- the company people love to hate. Shakespeare, another Englishman with a sense of humor, would ask the pertinent question, "What's in a name?" Not much. You can call it Qwest now, but the passion among customers remains: Given a legitimate choice in telecommunications vendors -- for voice, data and the myriad of other services now linked to these firms -- many, many of us can't wait for the day we can select someone else, anyone else.

I have always admired Qwest. I remember when Phillip Anschutz first spoke of his plans to build a network of fiber optics along the railroad rights-of-way he had acquired by building a railroad empire, and I remember hearing otherwise knowledgeable people suggest he didn't know what he was doing. That being in the 1980s, not many people had the vision of Anschutz. But to be honest, I really don't know what the hell Qwest does outside of buying US West. I know it's in telecommunications, and I know it...