, the company (then called Central Telephone and Electronics) began expanding into other states, and in 1968, CenturyLink was incorporated. Descendents of the founders ran the company until 2002, when the grandson of the founders, Clarke M. Williams, died in his mid-40s. CenturyLink went public in 1978, after acquiring additional rural phone lines. Many of these properties were purchased from incumbent telephone companies Verizon and the former Ameritech, which is now part of AT&T. Verizon and Ameritech sold rural assets to concentrate on mobile services and services to enterprise customers. When CenturyLink acquired EMBARQ in 2008, it began to shift from all rural properties to a mix of rural and metropolitan markets such as Las Vegas and Orlando. EMBARQ was a landline telephone company that Sprint had previ- ously spun off to concentrate on its own wireless services. The purchase of Qwest Communications in 2011 doubled CenturyLink's size, adding services to additional metropolitan areas such as Denver, Seattle, Min- neapolis, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. Qwest was the incumbent telephone company in 14 states in the western United States. Its territory was more sparsely populated than those of AT&T and Verizon and included difficult-to- cable mountainous regions. This made it challenging to profitably upgrade its networks due to the lower number of customers per square mile. A unit of Qwest offered long-distance service throughout the United States, mainly to small and mid-sized business and commercial customers. Qwest's recently upgraded 100-gigabit nationwide fiber network is a valuable addition to CenturyLink's midwestern regional fiber network that it purchased from Level 3 Communications in 2003. Owning interstate fiber networks saves on costs for its local companies to connect to the Internet and is an opportunity for leasing backhaul service to mobile companies. Backhaul networks carry mobile traffic from antennas at base stations to carriers' centralized data centers. Continued Regulatory Issues In 2011,