Lumen Technologies

It started as a small telephone company in Oak Ridge, Louisiana, in 1930. As CenturyLink it grew by acquiring companies larger than itself: Qwest in 2011 and Level 3 in 2017. The latter brought one of the internet's Tier 1 networks, and suddenly a rural carrier owned a sizeable share of America's backbone fibre.

In 2020 it renamed itself Lumen, to sound like a tech company rather than a phone company with copper lines. The acquisition debt came along, and much of the 2020s has gone into selling pieces — the consumer fibre business went to AT&T — and leasing fibre to AI data centres instead. The Level 3 name lives on in routing tables long after it vanished from the invoices.