NEW YORK-Teligent Corp. is the new name for Associated Communications L.L.C., a company established last year as a broadband wireless competitive local exchange carrier, announced Alex J. Mandl, its president.
Mandl, formerly president of AT&T Corp., said the new name “reflects our goal of becoming the smart choice for the growing number of business customers looking for reliable, high-bandwidth, low-cost local, long-distance and Internet service.”
The company, headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is “working on trials” of its digital microwave fixed wireless network, Mandl said at a Price Waterhouse L.L.P. Technology Forecast conference. He did not say when the company expected to deploy its system commercially.
As AT&T president, Mandl used to call companies like Teligent “ankle biters.” In the evolving telecommunications landscape, there will be behemoths and, “hundreds if not thousands of niche players finding new ways to serve certain market segments,” he said.
“We have enormous challenges in competing against very large, in some cases dominant, players,” Mandl said. “Digital microwave fixed wireless offers more quality and capacity than that of existing providers to solve the bottleneck problem, without which the full benefit of the Internet cannot be realized.”
