CenturyLink Vs. Time Warner

Perhaps the largest fundamental difference between the two companies is how customers receive their service. Most customers receive CenturyLink's services through phone wires. Time Warner, which purchased Road Runner Cable, offers service to customers through a coaxial cable originally used only for cable television services. Both companies maintain a complicated internal network that includes many of the same communication media, but their status as a phone and cable company, respectively, affects how they are regulated. It also affects what types of services each company is able to deliver, new technologies are rapidly expanding the types of services these companies can offer.

Through various purchases, mergers and general growth, the two companies have slowly expanded to cover much of the United States. Time Warner has service in 28 states, grouped into five geographic regions around New York State, the Carolinas, Texas, Ohio and Southern California. CenturyLink has access lines in 37 states, including large amounts of customers in Colorado, Washington, and Arizona. The two companies have a particularly large overlapping presence in the states of North Carolina, Texas, and Ohio.

Traditionally, Time Warner offered television service and CenturyLink offered telephone. With the dawning of the internet age, the two companies began to offer cable and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) internet services, respectively. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology has allowed Time Warner to begin offering competitive telephone services, in spite of not owning any Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) stations, as CenturLink does. Conversely, many major telephone companies have begun developing the ability to send television through their broadband telephone links. CenturyLink, however, only offers television services in partnership with satellite provider DirecTV.

Perhaps one of the biggest disparities between the two companies is in their broadband offerings. Basic broadband packages for CenturyLink and Time Warner begin with download speeds as low as 768 kilobits per second (kbps). The highest speed CenturyLink can offer their customers, however, is 10 megabits per second (Mbps). Time Warner can provide some of their customers with internet speeds as fast as 22 Mbps.