All the data you want, CLEC launches one-stop shopping in Florida

American Communications Services Inc. plans to announce an aggressive strategy this week to capture business customers' data needs.

The competitive local exchange carrier will roll out service first in Florida, where it bought the state's largest Internet service provider, CyberGate, in December. The new data services, available immediately, will be packaged under the brand e.spire and include features such as Internet, frame relay, routing, asynchronous transfer mode, Web hosting and firewall security services.

E.spire is positioned to offer small and medium-sized businesses a way to integrate different ingredients of their networks. The rollout includes a concentrated effort to offer a strong local presence with sales forces and support.

ACSI plans to spend the rest of the summer honing e.spire in Florida, then moving to a nationwide rollout in strategic areas in September and October, said Vernon Irvin, ACSI senior vice president of advanced data services.

"This is our coming out party of sorts," Irvin said. "When we go nationwide, we'll target areas where we've got facilities and where we've got [interconnection] agreements.

ACSI has a national ATM backbone serving 26 cities with a concentration in the South and Southeast. The carrier's Florida ATM backbone, built with switches from Newbridge Networks, has points of presence in Fort Myers, Miami, Orlando, Tallahassee, Tampa and West Palm Beach.

ACSI plans to use CyberGate's Internet expertise in much the same way MFS has with its UUNet acquisition and GTE has with BBN Planet, Irvin said.

The CLEC provides Internet backbone hauling and peering services to many consumer market ISPs, such as MCI, UUNet and Sprint, Irvin said. However, because ACSI is focused on business customers, the dial-up end user ISPs that they serve won't be a conflict of interest for e.spire, he said.