Qwest's network began as a railroad's side project. Philip Anschutz owned the Southern Pacific, and its telecom arm laid fiber-optic lines along the tracks, linked at the rail junctions. Qwest turned those rights of way into a national fiber network. When it filed to go public in 1997, the internet was driving up demand for bandwidth, and phone companies were hunting for capacity. Qwest offered investors a new, all-digital network built for that traffic.

A Billionaire's Rail Lines

The railroad already owned a long strip of land across the West. Putting digital fiber beside the rails gave Qwest a cheap path from city to city. Qwest, founded in 1996 and based in Denver, stretched that idea into a coast-to-coast network. It sold capacity to other carriers and offered its own long-distance service. Anschutz kept control. After the 1997 offering, his Anschutz Company still held about 84 percent of the stock.

From $22 to a Fraud Case

Qwest priced its shares at $22 in June 1997 and listed on Nasdaq as QWST. The stock climbed with the telecom boom. In 2000 Qwest took over US West, one of the regional Bell phone companies, in a deal worth about $48 billion. Then the boom ended. Regulators said Qwest had inflated its results from 1999 to 2002, and former CEO Joseph Nacchio was convicted of insider trading in 2007. CenturyLink bought Qwest in 2011 in a deal valued at $22.4 billion, including debt.

Cover: Secret Town Trestle, near Gold Run, from the series "Central Pacific Railroad", Charles Roscoe Savage. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a railroad trestle (fiber along the rails).