The FCC approved Windstream’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Paetec. In...
The FCC approved Windstream’s $2.3 billion acquisition of Paetec. In a non-docketed public notice Tuesday, the FCC said its staff concluded that the $2.3 billion deal would “serve the public interest” and wouldn’t harm competition. Announcing the deal in August,…
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Windstream said the deal would add about 100,000 fiber miles to Windstream’s network and help Windstream beef up its wireless backhaul, Ethernet, Multi-Protocol Label Switching and hosting businesses (CD Aug 2 p14). The proposed acquisition received only one formal opposition when the city of Rochester, N.Y., said it would lose taxpayer money that had been set aside to help Paetec build its new corporate headquarters there. Rochester settled with Windstream separately and dropped its opposition Nov. 13, the FCC said in the public notice. Most analysts said CLECs such as Paetec fared the worst under the FCC’s newly published Universal Service Fund order (CD Oct 28 p1). Earlier this month, we asked Guggenheim Partners analyst Paul Gallant if he saw mergers and acquisitions coming for the CLEC sector. He said: “The regulatory front isn’t going as well as CLECs would like, and their scale disadvantage means there is always M&A chatter around these companies. But CLECs’ edge is the ability to grab new opportunities quickly. An example is Time Warner Telecom, which is beginning to offer cloud computing to its telecom customers."