July 17th, 2008
Winning telecom bid goes to local independent company
By JENNIFER NICKULAS, jnickulas@manchexpress.com
For a Manchester-based telecommunications company that just won a $15 million state contract, being the “little guy in town” has worked to its advantage.
The company, G4 Communications, will provide data networking for the State of New Hampshire for the next five years, with an option to renew every five years, raising the potential value of the contract to $45 million, according to Alihan Ciftcioglu, the company’s vice president of operations and finance.
The win marks a victory for the company, which has about 20 employees and networking centers throughout the state, because it ousted incumbent Verizon Communications, Inc., the New Hampshire holdings of which were acquired by Fairpoint Communications Inc. earlier this year, said G4 Communications
chief technology officer and chairman of the board of directors Gent Cav.
“I believe that bigger institutions like working with smaller companies because they are considered more important,” Cav said. “And they do the same thing from our perspective – we like to work with local and smaller companies as well because we get better attention from them as well.”
This isn’t the first time Cav and Ciftcioglu’s company has been chosen over a larger, national company.
Six years ago, the State of New Hampshire selected the company over MCI for long-distance telephone service, Cav said.
“Six years ago, we were much smaller than we are today,” he said. “It was a choice for them at the time, replacing MCI and putting us in for the same service.”
Since then, G4 has added increased Internet capability, investing heavily in high-speed Internet access for rural areas of the state. “One of the things that has really helped us is all these years, different parts of New Hampshire are screaming for highspeed Internet access,” Cav said.
Larger carriers, such as Comcast and Verizon, left pockets of the state without coverage,
and G4 extended their growing network outward.
“I remember in 1999, we were trying to bring high-speed to portions of southern New Hampshire where Verizon was saying they didn’t have plans,” Cav said. “They didn’t want to spend the money and we didn’t mind going in there and trying to do it.”
The majority of G4 Communications’ clients are business or educational institutions, he said.
A law enacted by the Federal Communications Commission, The Telecommunications Act of 1996, gave small, independent companies the ability to offer services to keep prices competitive. It was the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in six decades, and let any communications business compete in any market against any other business. The act established competitive Local Exchange Carriers, or CLECs, such as G4 Communications to compete with other, already established Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers, or ILECs, such as MCI or Verizon.
It led to the formation of many small telephone and data service companies, few of which are still around now, Ciftcioglu said.
“There are some alternatives to the main ILEC in the area, which used to be Verizon and now Fairpoint,” he said. “However, there are not many left. Basically the strong ones that could survive in the marketplace did.”
