I am a smug Telcove weenie (customer) who has been watching the integration of Telcove into the L3 Borg with satisfaction, as network connectivity has gotten better and even their billing system seems to be slowly improving over time. Meanwhile have come to expect that almost any "Level3" issue raised on nanog will be on the Broadwing side. Apparently L3 honcho Kevin O'Hara seems to feel the same way: =================== (question from Greg Mesniaeff - Needham & Co.) Q. Thanks. Just made it. A quick question for Kevin, regarding the OSS integration challenges that you referred to, are any of them in any way tied to any recent changes in pricing and in volume dynamics, or put differently, what explains the lag between when you've made some of these acquisitions and now that these issues have come to the floor? Kevin O'Hara answers: A. Yeah. There's one word that describes it; it's called Broadwing. All of the previous WilTel and Level 3 were in a very similar business and we -- they had superior capabilities to us for voice, so we effectively opted into their capabilities there. We opted into the Level 3 capabilities for most other areas. So the integration there, even in the interim, was pretty straightforward, we didn't put much stress on it. For the metro companies, they were at various stages of maturity from a system and process standpoint, but none of them had sufficient scale to really kind of create a lot of stress. Broadwing had sufficient scale, was sufficiently different, and we're introducing sufficient number of changes, particularly trying to get the legacy Broadwing selling to on-net services, taking the Broadwing customers and integrating them into Level 3 systems. It was just the scale of Broadwing relative to where we were in the overall implementation of our end state architecture. We are too far along to opt into their systems and our systems weren't far enough along to make that transition smooth, which is what's caused us to operate in this hybrid environment. =================== Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/49542-level-3-communications-q2-2007- earnings-call-transcript?source=yahoo --Patrick