Covad Communications Company, also known as Covad Communications Group, was an American provider of

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

voice The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound produ ...

and

data communications Data communication, including data transmission and data reception, is the transfer of data, signal transmission, transmitted and received over a Point-to-point (telecommunications), point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication chann ...

. By 2006, the company had 530,000 subscribers, and ranked as the 16th largest ISP in the United States. Covad was acquired by U.S. Venture Partners, who in 2010 announced a three-way merger of MegaPath, Covad, and Speakeasy, creating a single Managed Services Local Exchange Carrier (MSLEC), providing voice and internet services; the new company was named MegaPath. In January 2015, telecommunications service provider Global Capacity acquired MegaPath's wholesale and direct access business, which included assets acquired from Covad. The name Covad was derived from acronyms which have varied over time, including ''COmbined Voice And Data'', ''Copper Over Voice And Data'', and in its earliest form, ''COpper Value ADded''.

History

Covad was the first service provider to offer a national

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric di ...

broadband service. In addition they offered

Voice over IP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also known as IP telephony, is a set of technologies used primarily for voice communication sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. VoIP enables voice calls to be transmitted as ...

, T1,

Web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web ho ...

, managed security, IP and dial-up, and bundled voice and data services directly through Covad's network and through

Internet Service Provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

s such as EarthLink and Speakeasy, value-added resellers, telecommunications carriers and affinity groups to businesses. Covad

services were available in 44 states, including 235 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), a services area available to over 50 percent of all businesses. The company was founded in San Jose, CA. By 2008, Covad added the Samsung Acemap DSLAM to their portfolio on top of their pre-existing Nokia D50 DSLAMs, to allow for ADSL2+ technology, which can reach DSL speeds up to 15 Mbit/s. The launch of the AceMAP was primarily instigated to provide combined POTS and ADSL2+ service to EarthLink end users and were deployed in more residential areas instead of concentrating on business-centric markets. Covad was acquired a by private equity firm,

Platinum Equity Platinum Equity, LLC is an American private equity investment firm founded by Tom Gores in 1995, headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. The firm focuses on leveraged buyout investments of established companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. ...

, in April 2008. In 2010, it was sold to U.S. Venture Partners, which merged Covad, and Speakeasy into MegaPath. The three-way merger produced an executive team comprising the former CEOs of all three former companies: Chairman and CEO (former MegaPath CEO) D. Craig Young, Chief Strategy Officer and Head of Wholesale Markets (former Covad CEO) Pat Bennett, and (former Speakeasy CEO) Bruce Chatterley as President of the Business Markets unit in charge of all non-wholesale customer sales, service and marketing. In mid-2010, Covad announced Ethernet-over-Copper services in the

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

market. The new Ethernet product ran over a Fujitsu Flashwave based Ethernet core and provided symmetrical speeds up to 20 Mbit/s. Ethernet over DS1 service was added soon after. In early 2011, Covad (now as Megapath) announced expansion of the services on a national level by the end of 2012. In September 2014, Global Capacity announced its plan to buy the assets acquired from Covad from MegaPath. The acquisition was completed on January 1, 2015.

References

External links

* {{Dot-com Bubble Dot-com bubble 1999 initial public offerings Internet service providers of the United States Private equity portfolio companies Technology companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct networking companies Networking companies of the United States Networking hardware companies 1996 establishments in California 2010 disestablishments in California Technology companies established in 1996 Technology companies disestablished in 2010