Level 3 Communications Queston #1- Jason Shaker

Jim Crowe's planned strategy of level 3 communicatons in the late 1990's was to go public and immediately start buiding its fiber-optic network. The reason that he wanted to do this is because a UUNet's cheif scientist Michael O'Dell stated that nework traffic was doubling every one hundred days. O'Dell went on to say that there was not enough fiber-optic capacity to go around and that "demand will far outstrip suply for the foreseeable future."

Crowe quickly raised $3 billion by 1998 which was when Crowe went public. By 2001 Level 3 raised some $13 billio, much in the form of debt. The goal was to raise money, rapidly build a high-capacity fiber optic network that linked major cities in the United States, and then cut prices to attract demand from major users of fiber-optic networks, including corportations, Internet service providers such as AOL, and traditional telecommunicatons companies.