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Technology Stocks : PairGain Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chicago who wrote (31760)	6/1/1999 2:13:00 PM
From: Joseph Moran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36349

Recent Announcement from Pair - and a little history of the equipment buyer. Advanced TelCom picks SR for HQ Offices to open on Courthouse Square - 03/11/1999 by CAROL BENFELL, Staff Writer The Press Democrat Santa Rosa, California. March 11, 1999 The independent telephone company Advanced TelCom Group, Inc. plans to open its doors on Courthouse Square in mid-May. The downtown facility will house executive, technical support and its $5.5 million Lucent call-switching center. Advanced TelCom, formed last year to offer telephone service in nine cities, is spending $1 million to renovate the old nightclub and restaurant on the west side of the square, said Gene Sokol, vice president of marketing services. The company will spend a projected $15 million over the next 12 months to add offices and equipment to serve Petaluma, Rohnert Park and Cotati. Advanced TelCom has about 50 employees and expects to add another 100 during the coming year as it establishes its headquarters in Sonoma County. About 20 employees will work at the Courthouse Square offices, while most will work at a separate facility off Stony Point Road. With $102 million in start-up capital, Advanced TelCom is also launching new offices in six cities in Washington and Oregon. "Our market is middle-sized cities like Santa Rosa, Petaluma, Tacoma and Salem," Sokol said. "We chose Santa Rosa for our headquarters because the quality of life is good here and, frankly, a lot of people wanted to move here." Advanced TelCom will compete head-on against Pacific Bell for the local consumer telephone dollar. It expects to find its customers by providing high-speed access to the Internet. "We're buying from Cerent and Diamond Lane," both local telecommunications companies, Sokol said. "We're going to have the latest equipment." The company also will offer more standard fare-- local and long distance service, and integrated messaging that coordinates e-mail, voice mail, faxes and other products. The founders and partners in Advanced TelCom are Clifford Rudolph, Curt Wheeling and Mike Black all of whom were senior executives with Brooks Fiber Communications, a St. Louis local telephone company that served 44 cities. In 1995, Brooks was the first company in the United States to offer full-service competition to one of the regional Bell companies. After Worldcom bought Brooks in 1998 for $3.3 billion, Rudolph, Wheeling and Black were approached by the venture capitalists who had financed the Brooks group and encouraged them to start their own company, Sokol said.