US telecom and data centre operator CenturyLink has attracted a number of potential buyers of its data centre operations, but has yet to decide whether to sell them, CEO Glen Post told investors during the company’s Q4 2015 earnings call. He reiterated CenturyLink was considering a number of options for the business. The company first mentioned a possible sale during its Q3 2015 financials presentation. At the time it said it owned 59 data centres in the US, Asia and Europe with more than 185 MW of power across 2.6 million square feet of raised floor capacity.
According to a transcript from Seeking Alpha, Post said, "We spoke to a number of interested parties who expressed interest in all options ranging from an outright purchase of our data centers and colocation business, a partnership and/or a joint venture. This is an ongoing process that could result in any one of these outcomes, including the potential sale of a portion of or all of our data center business." CenturyLink has also created a separate data centre/colocation division headed by a separate management team.
Separately, CFO Stewart Ewing said CenturyLink is looking at trialling metered usage in the second half, without saying which markets of if the metered approach would be applied to high-speed copper and/or Gigabit GPON services. He added, “We think it is important and our competition is using the metered plans today and we think that exploring those starts and trials later this year is our expectation.”
