One Communications is a Burlington, Massachusetts-based CLEC providing Telecommunications services to commercial entities. Company was formally established on July 3, 2006 as the result of a merger between CTC Communications and Choice One Communications along with their acquisition of Conversent Communications. On December 20, 2010 Earthlink announced that it will acquire One Communications for $370 million, which includes payment of approximately $285 million of One Comm net debt. According to their press release the acquisition will provide EarthLink with:
a strong IP network footprint in the Northeast, Midwest, and Mid Atlantic regions;
overlapping connection cities with EarthLink Business long-haul routes in major markets including Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City;
geographical expansion and scale for managed IP services product strategy supported by a talented One Comm employee base; and
a solid foundation for potential future acquisitions of revenue bases in the region.
On April 1, 2011, Earthlink announced that it had completed the acquisition of One Communications. Following the close of the transaction, EarthLink will integrate One Comm into its "EarthLink Business" division.
Choice One Communications was a Rochester, New York-based CLEC providing Telecommunications services to commercial entities. The company was founded in 1998. The company announced their plan to merge with CTC on February 10, 2006. The merger was completed in July 2006.
Conversent Communications
Conversent Communications was a Marlboro, Massachusetts-based CLEC and was founded in 1999 as New England Voice and Data. The company name was changed to Conversent in 2000. Conversent acquired REON broadband corporation, Fibernet of West Virginia and Northeast Data Vault before the One Communications merger. In 2005 they became one of the first telephony carriers to introduce the concept of "Dynamic Bandwidth" as an official product. Dynamic Bandwidth works by transmitting voice and data over a T1 connection using ATM as the underlying protocol. The amount of available bandwidth for data "expands" by 64k for each voice line not in use. When a voice line goes off-hook, the bandwidth reserved for that voice line becomes solely available for use with that line until the call ends, when it becomes usable for data again. Using this concept, a T1 that would normally provide 768k of data and 12 voice lines can provide a full 1.536 Mbit/s connection when no voice lines are in use. CTC and Choice One announced the acquisition of Conversent on March 28, 2006. The acquisition was completed in July 2006.