document: Bye , Bye Qwest and Hello Cloud ! The merger between CenturyLink and Qwest officially closed today , creating the nation 's third-largest phone company in a world where being a phone company means less and less . To honor the occasion , CenturyLink -LRB- we lose the Qwest name -RRB- offered to have Christopher Ancell , president of business markets , talk with me about what the future holds in his division , which includes corporate telecommunications customers and those buying data center services . The two big themes are that bandwidth demand is continuing to grow and that the new scale gained through this acquisition might help CenturyLink make some cloud-related deals . In the last year , Qwest had tiptoed into the on-demand services market by providing application recovery and interactive voice recognition on demand , but it was n't as large a player as Verizon with its Compute-as-a-Service products . And in January , Verizon said it would purchase Terremark , a provider of private clouds and data centers in a deal valued at $ 1.4 billion , saying cloud services were a big growth area for the company . Ancell agrees , although when I asked about the likelihood of a CenturyLink acquisition in this space , he replied , `` Glen -LSB- Post -RSB- is an acquirer and has been the CEO for 19 years and has a track record of acquiring companies , and I would expect that to continue . '' Ancell says the merger gives CenturyLink scale and larger free cash flow , which could boost its deal-making capabilities . The company is trying to figure out what customers want from Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers and what they want as software . Qwest had 17 data centers that it brings to CenturyLink , which as of the end of 2010 , reported $ 172.94 million in cash and $ 2 billion in operating free cash flow . It does have more than $ 7 billion in debt , however , and none of that includes Qwest 's contribution . Aside from a possible rush to the cloud , CenturyLink closes this deal with 190,000 miles of fiber , after adding 75,000 miles of Qwest local fiber and 30,000 miles of Qwest backbone fiber . As it seeks to serve businesses and data centers , the biggest constant is bandwidth demand continuing to grow . Ancell echoed what I had heard recently about larger corporations wanting to upgrade to 100 Gigabit access from 10 Gigabit pipes -- completely skipping over the 40 Gigabit access . He cautioned that not everyone was skipping 40 Gigabit access , but that the awesome demand for video and other applications was causing companies to look hard at their upgrades . With 40 percent of network traffic being video , the demand is continuing to rise , he said . `` People just need more and more bandwidth at rates that almost have us saying , ` What is going on ? ''' Ancell said . Image courtesy of Flickr user Torkildr . Related content from GigaOM Pro -LRB- subscription req 'd -RRB- : Verizon Buys Terremark , and Rackspace Looks Even Better Mobile Operators ' Strategies for Connected Devices Report : Delivering Content in the Cloud Copyright 2011 GigaOm . All Rights Reserved . GigaOm is an independent blog network . Read More '' ''
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