NEW YORK-Teligent Inc., Vienna, Va., opened for business Oct. 27, offering its bundled point-to-multipoint telecommunications services to small- and medium-size companies in 10 major cities.
The commercial launch occurred in Chicago; Denver; Los Angeles; New York; Tampa, Fla.; Washington, D.C.; and Austin, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio, Texas.
By the end of the year, Teligent also plans to market its services in the Florida cities of Jacksonville, Miami and Orlando, and in the California cities of San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose. It has licenses to offer communications services in 35 states and the District of Columbia.
“We are facilities-based, with our own network. The difference between us and a cellular provider is that we’re launching building by building,” said Richard J. Hanna, senior vice president for sales and marketing of Teligent’s Eastern Division.
By late October, Teligent had leased “for a small fee” antenna space on the tops of about 100 commercial buildings in New York, and other similar arrangements are underway, said Hanna.
Landlords are allies rather than adversaries in this antenna-siting process because Teligent offers their business tenants access to high-speed bandwidth at no charge to building owners, said Hanna. Providing this communications access is a competitive advantage for landlords, he added.
Teligent’s Digital SmartWave technology taps into whatever customer premises equipment already is installed. When a telephone, computer or video conference device is in use, the signals travel over existing internal wiring to Teligent’s rooftop antenna. This, in turn, relays the voice, data or video signals to a Teligent base station antenna.
The base station antenna gathers signals from a cluster of surrounding buildings, aggregates the signals, then routes them to a Teligent broadband switching center. There, Teligent uses asynchronous transfer mode switches and data routers along with Nortel DMS 500 switches to hand off the traffic to other networks, including the public circuit-switched voice network, the packet-switched Internet and private data networks.
Teligent has signed interconnection agreements with incumbent local exchange carriers in 29 states and the District of Columbia.
“We bypass the Bell companies to originate service and use them to terminate calls,” Hanna said.
“Our major competitors are the regional Bell operating companies, the long-distance carriers and the Internet service providers.”
Customers that sign a one-year contract with Teligent will receive for a flat monthly rate unlimited local, long-distance and dedicated Internet services at speeds of at least 56K.
The bill amount will be set in advance at 30 percent below the amount individual business customers demonstrate they paid for those services during the several months prior to signing on with Teligent, Hanna said.
International calls and Internet access at T-1 speeds are priced separately from this general offer.
All the carrier’s customers will have access to “e-magine,” which Teligent describes as “a state-of-the-art, interactive, Web-based management tool that will give [customers] access to their billing and account information in ways that are revolutionary.
“Using their Internet browser, customers will be able to sort and analyze calls by account code, employee, originating number or other criteria-virtually any way they choose,” added the company. Customers can download this data for their own use and can order services online, said Teligent.
“Millions of small- and mid-sized businesses have struggled for years with high prices, indifferent service, painfully slow Internet access and confusing bills,” said Alex J. Mandl, chairman and chief executive officer of Teligent.
“Today, we’re letting the world know we intend to help [them] solve their cost, service and bandwidth problems so they can compete with any company, no matter how big.”
