CenturyLink

U.S. incumbent telcos have taken charge of the U.S. retail Ethernet market as they continue to expand their respective portfolios and footprints to serve their SMB and enterprise customers, but they all face a challenging economic reality that's slowed revenue growth.

On the surface, cloud or IT infrastructure service initiatives appear to be attractive offerings for telecom service providers, but are they? Cloud or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) explicitly involves network services and hosting/IT infrastructure services. However, telecom operators have been slow to adopt these new services.

AT&T on Wednesday took a step toward closing another chapter in its ongoing union contract negotiations by striking a tentative agreement with the Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 9 for wireline workers in the telco's West region.

CenturyLink has continued to follow a pattern that's become as familiar to telcos as it's become alien to incumbent cable operators: It added 10,000 subscribers to its Prism TV service during the fourth quarter and now has 115,000 IPTV subs throughout its footprint.

CenturyLink said it picked up 10,000 subscribers for its Prism IPTV service in the fourth quarter, growing its pay TV customer base to 115,000.

CenturyLink reported on Wednesday that Q4 2012 operating revenues declined 1.5 percent year-over-year to $4.58 billion reflecting the trend of declining legacy services revenues being offset by an increase in both next-gen business and consumer broadband and its Prism IPTV services.