Saturday, March 18, 2000Acquisition opens markets for InfiNet
Blue Ash firm to go national
BY MIKE BOYER
The Cincinnati EnquirerInfiNet, the Blue Ash provider of voice and networking equipment and services, is going national as a result of its recent acquisition by Teligent Inc.
“We will be a totally different company a year to 18 months from now,” said Jeff Holtmeier, who started InfiNet 18 years ago as a tele phone retailer then called Phoneland.
InfiNet employs about 100 and also has offices in Lexington, Louisville, Dayton and Columbus. It will be expanding operations this year to cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and Dallas, and eventually all 40 U.S. markets served by Teligent, said Mr. Holtmeier, who continues as InfiNet president. Teligent started service this year in Cincinnati.
Financial terms of Teligent's acquisition of InfiNet, completed last month, weren't disclosed. Last year, InfiNet had sales of more than $15 million.
Keith Kaczmarek, senior vice president of Teligent's enterprise group, said InfiNet is one of several acquisitions by his company designed to complement its broadband services and provide customers a complete telecommunications solution.
Mr. Holtmeier said national expansion has been his goal for the past three years. He had talked with investment banks about expanding before being approached by Teligent.
He said Teligent “liked our business model, which was a lot like their own.”
Mr. Kaczmarek said his company and InfiNet share the same philosophy and approach to the telecommunications market.
Teligent, which last year landed a $500 million investment from a group headed by Microsoft Corp., plans to ex pand to 74 markets in the United States and overseas.
Headed by former AT&T president Alex Mandl, Teligent is building a national telecommunications network that uses digital microwave signals rather than copper wires to send voice, data and video for small and medium-size businesses.
Those smaller businesses represent about two-thirds of what's projected to be a $250 billion U.S. telecommunications market by 2008, officials said.
Although fiber-optic cable has been touted as the way to deliver these broadband services over a single wire, Mr. Holtmeier said, “96 percent of buildings today don't have fiber cable to deliver broadband.”
Teligent, which turned up service to 10,000 customers and signed lease or option agreements for 7,000 buildings nationally last year, delivers its fixed wireless service through small antennas on the roofs of customer buildings.
When a customer picks up a telephone, accesses the Internet or switches on a video conference, the signal travels over the building's wiring to the rooftop antenna where it is relayed to a Teligent base station, which gathers signals from a number of buildings and routes them to a switching center, where they're handed off to other networks.
Teligent acquired InfiNet to handle installation and networking inside customer buildings, the so-called “last-foot” from the wall jack to the customer's phone and PC.
Teligent, which went public in late 1997 at $21.50 closed Friday at $92.25, off $4.75. The company reported a loss last year — its first full year of operation — of $529 million on sales of $31.3 million, but analysts were impressed that its fourth-quarter loss was less than expected.
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