The Lumen Technologies operating companies are local exchange carriers owned by Lumen Technologies, the third largest landline telephone company in the United States. [1]
Lumen Technologies operating companies consist of operations inherited from various predecessor companies, which is reflected in the differing names of the companies and partially overlapping service territories; all operating companies do business using the CenturyLink brand. Predecessors include:
CenturyLink grew as Century Telephone (later CenturyTel) through acquiring many small and mid-size telephone companies. These include:
The following companies were acquired from Embarq, which was formed in 2006 by the spin-off of the local telephone operations of Sprint Corporation (previously named United Telephone). It also includes companies formerly owned by Centel which was purchased by Sprint in 1993.
Qwest acquired US West, one of the Baby Bells, in 2000. Qwest was in turn acquired by CenturyLink in 2011.