Last month the understaffed FCC rushed through their approval of the CenturyTel and Embarq merger, attaching conditions that are largely meaningless. The two companies officially announced that the new merger is complete. The new company, dubbed CenturyLink will serve 7.5 million customers in 33 states, including 2.1 million broadband customers, and more than 440,000 video subscribers. Other than seeing the CenturyLink brand on your bills, little should change for customers of either company this year. Both companies still need shareholder approval, which they don't expect to finalize until May of 2010.

Both companies idea of "next-gen broadband" is ADSL2+ with few exceptions, and despite the merger rhetoric coming from the FCC, CenturyTel is actually lowering capex -- so you probably shouldn't expect significant upgrades any time soon. When CenturyTel acquired their last company, Madison River Communications, all of Madison's pricing structures were grandfathered -- meaning Embarq customers shouldn't have to deal with higher prices, for a while.

In other words, if you're either an Embarq or CenturyTel customer things won't be changing for a long while. Whether that's good or bad depends on your experience with each company. You can check out our reviews for Embarq here, and CenturyTel here. We'll of course keep all impacted customers up to date as things begin to change.