ATLANTA – Sept. 18, 2006 – Southern Telecom, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Atlanta-based Southern Company (NYSE: SO), today announced that it has expanded its Florida customer base with the addition of FiberLight, a leading provider of network infrastructure solutions and strategic network design services. Southern Telecom provides wholesale dark fiber optic cable and co-location solutions to large enterprise and telecom carrier customers.
Southern Telecom has 1,200 route miles of fiber installed in the Southeast. To best serve customers throughout the region, Southern Telecom also builds spurs off this route to support many nearby tier two-plus cities. The company’s extensive Florida fiber network connects multiple cities from Jacksonville to Miami to Tampa to Orlando.
FiberLight is utilizing the Southern Telecom Florida fiber network to connect two of its major network cities. FiberLight built extensive fiber networks in Tampa and Lakeland, Fla., approximately 30 miles apart, and selected Southern Telecom to provide the “Middle Mile” connectivity between the two.
“Southern Telecom’s flexibility in providing a tie-in to our existing Metro networks along with their reasonable pricing and ‘enabling’ attitude was critical in allowing FiberLight to maintain its aggressive growth in providing fiber services to its broad base of traditional and wireless carriers as well as large enterprise customers,” said Wade Robertson, senior vice president of business development at FiberLight.
“Southern Telecom has one of the most extensive fiber networks in the Southeast. In fact, our Florida fiber route passes through six percent of the U.S. population,” said Leif Ericson, business development manager for Southern Telecom. “Not only is it more cost effective for FiberLight to partner with us, but our solutions will eliminate bandwidth as an impediment to growth, without major capital expenditures or maintenance obligations.”
About Southern Telecom
Southern Telecom is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Southern Company that provides long-haul and metropolitan dark fiber connecting Atlanta with other smaller cities throughout the Southeast. The company also provides network elements such as rights of way, dark fiber, conduit, co-location and other related maintenance services. Southern Telecom is certified in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia and also at the federal level. For more information about Southern Telecom, please call (404) 506-5120 or visit www.southern-telecom.com.
About Southern Company
With 4.3 million customers and more than 41,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company (NYSE: SO) is the premier energy company serving the Southeast, one of America’s fastest-growing regions. A leading U.S. producer of electricity, Southern Company owns electric utilities in four states and a growing competitive generation company, as well as fiber optics and wireless communications. Southern Company brands are known for excellent customer service, high reliability and retail electric prices that are significantly below the national average. Southern Company has received the highest ranking in customer satisfaction among U.S. electric service providers for seven consecutive years by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Visit our Web site at www.southerncompany.com.
About FiberLight, LLC
FiberLight, LLC (formerly Xspedius Fiber Group) is an Atlanta-based company with twelve years of experience in creating networks for some of the most demanding customers in the Telecommunications industry. Since its inception in 1993 as American Communications Services Inc. (ACSI), they have installed over 400,000 duct and fiber miles with over 5,300 access points, as well as hundreds of laterals off their backbone. As a leading provider of network infrastructure solutions and strategic network design services, FiberLight designs, constructs and maintains an extensive Fiber Optic Infrastructure for a diverse customer base including local and long distance telecommunications carriers, Internet Service Providers, municipalities, utilities, Fortune 500 companies, school systems, local, city, and Federal Government entities. FiberLight fully owns a robust dark fiber network throughout eight primary metro markets – Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MD; Dallas/Ft.Worth, TX; Houston, TX; San Antonio, TX; Tampa, FL; South Florida; and Washington, D.C. Visit our Web site at www.fiberlight.com.