Carol Wilson

In a close vote divided among three web hosters, Telenisus was the top pick. Under the leadership of CEO Gordon Reichard Jr., Telenisus developed what it calls the Built for e-Business platform that automates many customer care and service delivery functions. The company also incorporated automated Web application security in its hosting service to enable […]

I dont remember the year, but I do remember the speech. It was sometime around 1989, or 1990, or even 1991, and the speaker was a man named Richard Snelling, VP of networks at BellSouth. In front of an industry crowd assembled for Supercomm (I think it was in Atlanta), he announced that the time […]

Who says competition is dead and new competitors extinct? Certainly not Looking Glass Networks, which today announced that it has turned up new networks in nine metropolitan areas with the intent of selling services to other service providers and large enterprise customers. Founded in April 2000, the company has raised $450 million in financing to […]

Service bundling has gotten a bad rap as a competitive strategy. AT&T backed off its major initiatives to integrate voice, data and video services into a single package, even though its AT&T Broadband unit continues to offer all three services in many areas. Sprints Integrated On-Demand Network, the industrys most ambitious next-generation bundling of services, […]

With its two-way, high-speed internet access, StarBand Communications was chosen as the most innovative ISP for its ability to deliver broadband to a mass audience, much of which is unable to get cable modem or DSL. “I love the satellite approach,” Heckart says. “I think we need to continue to push the envelope on innovative […]

This category produced one of the more interesting ties. Multiple judges suggested one mobile wireless data company that showed significant innovation — Metricom — that had already folded its tent for financial reasons. Many of the same judges admired Sprint Broadband Direct for its fixed wireless data services. Metricom, which closed up shop in August, […]

The lone repeat winner for 2001 is Yipes Communications, provider of Gigabit Ethernet services over optical networks in major metro areas. While other companies are also providing Gig-E as a service over optical pipes, CEO Jerry Parricks Yipes was chosen by the judges for going beyond that service to develop a network architecture that can […]

The cable industry presented our second tie: Glasgow Electric Plant Board and Insight Communications. Glasgow EPB, run by Superintendent William J. Ray, is a much-lauded local electric utility that wound up building a cable network so successful that the existing cable player — a Scripps-Howard company that had been acquired by Comcast — decided to […]

This category features our final tie, between two service providers that have taken advantage of the competitive market in different ways. IXTC, headed by CEO Tom Evslin, provides global call completion to the full range of the worlds carriers, using a voice-over-IP backbone with points of presence in 117 countries. In June, ITXC signed an […]

The past year has been a wild ride for service providers, which found themselves challenged — and how — not only by rocky financial markets, but also by a more demanding and discerning customer base. Those that survived did so by coupling smart business plans with clever new ideas, displaying the kind of innovation the […]

If there was an overwhelming choice within any category, it was Broadwing, best known for its national optical fiber backbone. Billed as the nations first intelligent, all-optical network, the backbone is a multivendor marvel, combining Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing fiber with Cienas optical core switching, Nortel Networks routers and ultra-long-haul gear from Corvis. Broadwing has […]

From a field that was riddled with financial failures this year, IntelliSpace emerged victorious, due in no small part to its survival skills. Even last years winner, Allied Riser Communications, is moving out of the business, and one-time industry leaders such as OnSite Access have already given up the ghost and sold their assets at […]