Williams Re-Enters Backbone Role With Big Deals (Inter@ctive Week)
From Inter@ctive Week Online for January 7, 1998 by Peter Lambert
With a flourish, Williams Communications Group ended a three-year
noncompete agreement with WorldCom Inc., announcing a $150 million
infrastructure upgrade contract with Ascend Communications Inc., a
20-year, $260 million transmission capacity lease to carrier Intermedia Communications Inc. and a five-year, multimillion-dollar capacity lease to U S West Communications Group.
In January 1995, Williams sold all but one strand of its 11,000-mile
national fiber-optic network - built by pulling fiber through thousands of decommissioned natural-gas pipelines - to WorldCom for $2.5 billion. The noncompete clause in that deal kept Williams from launching a range of frame relay, cell relay and private business line services.
Until now.
"We are back, big time," said Howard Janzen, president and chief
executive officer of Williams Communications, which includes equipment
and multimedia integration services provider WilTel; national fiber
network provider Williams Network; international fiber and satellite
transmission service provider Vyvx; network conferencing and enhanced
fax services provider Global Access; and interactive distance learning
provider Williams Learning Network.
Claiming 125,000 customers and 8,000 employees, Williams plans to extend its fiber-optic network to 18,000 miles by year's end. The network will feature Ascend's newest generation of Asynchronous Transfer Mode and frame relay multiservice, "intelligent core" switches.
"The traditional voice infrastructure has served packet data services
well until now, but the network Williams is building and the new
networks people will build are needed to accommodate the huge growth in data traffic," said Dan Smith, executive vice president and general
manager of Ascend's core systems division.
U S West will use Williams' network to extend its !nterprise Data
Networking Services and planned long-distance consumer services to
customers beyond its 14-state region. Intermedia will use the network to extend its voice, data and video services reach from 22 to 35 markets by mid-1998 and its capacity to 2.5 gigabits per second and beyond over the 20-year deal.
The goal, Janzen said, is "to build the nation's premier backbone for
wholesale services." The company claims that $1 billion in long-term
commitments from wholesale customers is in place.
Williams can be reached at www.wilcom.com
Ascend can be reached at www.ascend.com
Intermedia can be reached at www.intermedia.com
U S West can be reached at www.uswest.com |
