One Communications
Address: 220 Bear Hill Road, Waltham, MA 02451
Phone: 781-466-8080, 800-883-6000
Fax: 781-466-1306
Website: www.onecommunications.com
Number of Employees: 2,500
Top Executive: Thomas J. Casey, CEO
Product or Service: Telecommunications
Year Founded: 1981 (Original companies)
One Communications: A new standard in phone, Internet & data service for business
Living up to its new name, One Communications provides central Massachusetts business with one big difference from the monopoly phone companies: One Communications gives small and medium-sized businesses a level of personal customer service that the historic large phone companies simply don’t provide. The largest privately-held provider of telecommunications services in the country, One Communications represents the integrated companies of Choice One, CTC Communications, Conversent and FiberNet.
Telecommunications today is so much more than phones. One Communications offers medium- and larger-sized businesses an integrated package, which can include local and long distance voice services, high-speed data services, Internet service, and an array of web hosting solutions tailored to their specific needs.
For Worcester area customers, the name change means "four companies are now one with a broader product range," says Russell Oliver, Chief Technology Officer. "They will continue to enjoy the company’s superior service. Local competitors, however, will experience much greater pricing pressure."
The expanded company’s network accommodates multi-state business customers in 16 states, from Bangor down to Washington and out to Wisconsin. But they’re not recreating the old copper wires of the Bell System. Their network is a series of software switches in some 700 "collocation sites" linked through an internet protocol (IP) core, supported by nearly 10,000 route miles of fiber optic cables. It’s a system of rings with redundant paths. If a connection breaks down between collocations, traffic can be reversed along the loop to reach its destination in a matter of microseconds.
This network density, combined with advanced network technologies, enables One Communications to provide high value services at competitive prices. Density is the key word for the company’s mission, Oliver explains. Increasing numbers of customer clusters create greater efficiencies for customer service.
Staying ahead of technological change is vital to the company’s success. CTC Communications was known as an experienced Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology leader, making history on December 14, 2000 when the firm placed the first VoIP call to the public network.
Their futuristic outlook hasn’t always been well understood by others. "We were considered the only freak in the village, but now we’re called pioneers," says Oliver with a grin.
Back in 1981, CTC Communications, one of the new entity’s companies, was an independent sales agent of telephone services. The firm offered better customer service than New England Telephone and grew to be one of the largest agents in the United States.
In the mid-’90s, the company began building its own switching centers with fiber optics. The emergence of softswitches to replace traditional circuit switches revolutionized the industry. Operating over the Internet, the new switches handle exponentially more voice calls, and data too.
"We understood early on that it was a bandwidth game," notes Oliver. The scale of change was clear: Worcester’s windowless telephone building on Chestnut Street has four floors of circuit switches to manage telephone traffic. By contrast, Oliver explains, that building’s "entire switching service could be handled by one filing cabinet-sized panel of softswitches."
By early 2005, the making of One Communications was underway with CTC’s series of aggressive acquisitions: Lightship Telecom and Connecticut Broadband, and then in February 2006 a "merger of equals" with Choice One, even though that company was five times the size of CTC. Soon, CTC and Choice One together acquired Conversent Communications of Marlborough. In just over a year, "we multiplied our number of collocations by a factor of ten," Oliver says. For the new world of telecommunications, density is destiny.
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