PAETEC announced that it is merging with Cavalier Telephone this morning. The transaction is worth about $796M if I read between the lines correctly - $336M in debt and $460M in financing. So PAETEC gets about $800M in additional revenue for $796M.

CavTel will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of PAETEC. Does that mean integration will be unlikely? Just one more asset under the umbrella? How does this integrate with Energy and Allworx and MacLeod?

One of the assets is Intellifiber and its 17,000 route miles of fiber. It will be interesting to see how PAETEC leverages that since  CavTel couldn't and no one had leveraged MacLeod fiber yet. (I have a e-book coming out on how to sell to Lit Buildings, they might want to buy).

PAETEC gets another data center and MSP, since CavTel bought one in January.

To me this is consolidation for consolidation sake. As if getting bigger is going to help without Focus. Who are your customers and why?

As if you can compete against the ILEC's who are all but unregulated. PAETEC, CavTel and every other CLEC depends on the ILEC last mile. Getting bigger doesn't alleviate that issue.

For any merger, I would love to hear the plan for how the acquiring company is going to honestly leverage the acquired assets better than the previous management team. Just once.

This is the mess than is eroding our economy on a weekly basis. M&A for bankers, stockholders and Wall Street. It doesn't add value. It doesn't add synergies that add value. It's a paper play. It wasn't like they bought Leap or Cricket.