Qwest offers voluntary buyouts to landline employees
Denver based Qwest Communications International Inc. announced Tuesday that it will offer a voluntary buyout to employees responsible for traditional land lines. The offer is to less than 2 percent of Qwest’s almost 40,000 employees.
Thousands of customers are abandoning legacy land line phones in favor of wireless and IP based phone lines. The number of land lines in 2007 dropped 7.3 percent to 12.78 million from the previous year. “That’s an industrywide trend,” said Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman. “Everybody in the business has been facing that in light of competition.”
“Over the years, we have turned first to our natural attrition rate to balance the loss of traditional access lines,” said Bob Tregemba, Qwest’s executive vice president of Network Operations. “This program is part of our continuing effort to match our workforce to our work load.”
Traditional land line companies have known about the changes taking place for a number of years. Land line services will not go away, but the business models will certainly change for those providers. Industry analysts can agree on one thing, communications will soon converge onto a data pipe. But telecom providers are fighting tooth and nail to be more than just a “dumb pipe”. Soon, services that support many providers will become a commodity, and those providers will have to be able to support themselves in other ways.
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