Other key points from Crowe’s presentation:

• Consolidation will continue in the competitive space because AT&T and Verizon have changed the market dynamic by blending local and long-distance services again. Long-distance players with good margins and local operators with metro clusters are acquisition targets, but Level 3 is not interested in becoming a “serial acquirer” and will focus on integrating its acquisitions and getting its business processes in order.
• Corporate IT departments no longer drive growth – individuals do. “When I first started, demand was about corporate demand – we were dealing with a senior vice president or CIO,” Crowe said. “Today it is meeting the needs of individuals – personalization, style and the consumer market increasingly dominates. The CIO and his staff need to enable individuals to work anywhere, anytime.”
• The content distribution business is the long-term game for Level 3, which is why the company has acquired intellectual property in this realm as well as deployed caching and storage globally. “Content distribution is where we are focusing our effort,” Crowe said. “We believe very firmly that in the longer term, the larger majority of traffic on IP will be large objects, big video-based communications, either file-based or streamed, real-time or batched. It is already almost 50% of the traffic on our network today.”