With extensive coverage throughout California, Pac-West provides wholesale access in the western U.S. to both regional and national ISPs.

by Jeff Goldman [October 20, 2004]

Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. was founded in 1980—though Reid Cox, Pac-West's Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations, says the company's roots go back to a telephone network that its founder, John LaRue, built in his backyard when he was eight years old.

After gathering discarded Pac Bell equipment from dump sites, Cox says, LaRue built a small but functional network that connected various homes in his neighborhood—until a Pac Bell worker noticed the additional lines running up a nearby pole. "One day, two big sedans with a bunch of men in suits showed up with a cease-and-desist order for running an unregulated utility, and they confiscated his equipment," Cox says.

Pac-West 800-PAC-WEST (800-722-9378) serviceproviders@pacwest.com

His father explained the situation to the local sheriff, and the equipment was returned—but Cox says LaRue learned a lesson from the experience. "That instilled in John a desire not only to excel at telecommunications, but also to create, as much as he could, an alternative to the monopoly that was dictating everything," he says.

LaRue founded Pac-West initially to offer a range of telecommunications services, but he soon shifted into working with ISPs. "ISPs were looking for telephone support services to allow them to reach out to their end users, and that was something that the monopolies at the time were not particularly interested in doing," Cox says.

Coverage and pricing
Pac-West now offers wholesale dialup services with a SuperPOP network architecture that's designed to make it easier for ISPs to provide local access to their customers. Multiple rate centers across multiple LATAs are aggregated into each SuperPOP facility, enabling an ISP to expand local coverage broadly by connecting to a single SuperPOP. "[LaRue] really jumped all over the opportunity to create a compelling value proposition for ISPs in California," Cox says.

The company's coverage is focused on the western U.S., with in-depth coverage throughout California, as well as Washington, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. The coverage in California, Cox says, is a strong selling point for the company. "There are just a handful of rate centers in the middle of Death Valley, and a few other places, that we're not active in," he says.

George Sutcliffe, Pac-West's Senior Director of Marketing, says that kind of focused coverage has led to the company serving a wide variety of ISPs. "We've got the full range, from the small regional guy that supports a small town in Shasta County, California, all the way through the name brand ISPs," Sutcliffe says.

The company's pricing isn't published, but Sutcliffe says all pricing arrangements are flexible. "We've got several models, from usage-based solutions to flat rate solutions," he says. "We really try to match them up to the customer's needs, whether they like to have just a fixed cost and know what their bills are every month, or a pay-as-you-go variable solution."

Network architecture
Jim Murphy is President of DSL Extreme, an ISP based in Los Angeles, California. Murphy says his company has been working with Pac-West since soon after DSL Extreme was founded. "We started off very, very early with Pac-West, while we just had maybe 24 dial-in lines and we thought we were hot stuff," he says.

As DSL Extreme grew, Murphy says, the company decided to move on to a managed modem service with another carrier—but they soon switched back to Pac-West. "Pac-West has a really unique product," he says. "Their SuperPOPs aggregate a big geographic chunk that we can backhaul to our main POPs. It's been very instrumental to us."

Pac-West's network architecture, he says, makes things much easier to manage. "I can take all my dialup traffic for all of Southern California, from Mammoth, San Diego, Santa Barbara, and pull it back to my LA SuperPOP," Murphy says. "It gives you a wide swath of territory that if you were to build out yourself, it would be near impossible."

Finally, Murphy says, the company has been easy to work with. Pac-West dedicates specific reps to each client in order to ensure that concerns are dealt with efficiently—and Murphy says that's made a huge difference. "It's nice to have the same people to talk to year in and year out," he says. "Maybe your original rep has been promoted—but you can still always call them with an issue, and they're still there."

— End

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	[Nov. 27, 2000]	How to Pick A Wholesale Access Provider

Online resource:
	Wholesale Dialup Directory