PRIVATE EQUITY OWNED
Brightspeed
Includes CenturyLink, Lumen, Brightspeed Internet
telecom · Charlotte, NC
- PE Firm
- Apollo Global Management →
- Year Acquired
- 2022
Apollo bought aging internet infrastructure serving millions of rural Americans, and somehow made CenturyLink seem reliable by comparison.
What They Did
- Apollo-backed Brightspeed bought Lumen/CenturyLink's copper-line infrastructure across 20 states for $7.5 billion in October 2022, serving 6.5 million locations
- Promised at least $2 billion over five years to bring fiber to 3 million locations — less than half of the 6.5 million it took over
- Customers report repair appointments that slip by a month and fixes that take over a month to complete — in areas with no alternative provider
Since the Acquisition
- Customers handed from CenturyLink to Brightspeed say service went from bad to worse, with repairs that drag past a month when technicians show up at all
- One Virginia business went three weeks without phone service and called Brightspeed 19 times trying to get it fixed. The county's answer was to start recruiting a competing provider
- Customers describe calls routing to overseas call centers, where they struggle to understand reps and get wrong answers in the middle of outages
Sources
- CenturyLink issues continue now with BrightSpeed — WSET(2022-10-10)
- Brightspeed: All Circuits are Busy — Yes! Weekly / Triad Today(2024-10-09)
- Brightspeed launches five-year plan to spend $2B on fiber — Light Reading(2021-11-17)
- Lumen to sell local incumbent carrier operations in 20 states to Apollo Funds for $7.5 billion — Lumen Technologies via PR Newswire(2021-08-03)
- Brightspeed Officially Launches Operations and Begins Large-Scale Fiber Network Deployment — PR Newswire(2022-10-03)
- Frustration grows in Campbell County over Brightspeed's static-filled landline service — WSET(2025-02-27)
- Alternative solutions arise as Brightspeed outage disrupts local business communications — WSET(2025-03-04)