Telecom Valley

Telecom Valley was an area located in Sonoma County, California specifically the Redwood Business Park of Petaluma, California.

Telecom Valley is the term coined for the North San Francisco Bay Area Highway 101 corridor between Petaluma and Santa Rosa in Northern California.

It was derived from its South Bay Area cousin Silicon Valley. In 1969, Don Green, later nicknamed the "Father of Telecom Valley", founded Digital Telephone Systems (DTS) in San Rafael, CA. It is considered the original seed for Telecom Valley which developed farther north in Sonoma County driven by lower cost facilities and housing. Digital Telephone Systems was an early innovator in the Telecom Equipment arena developing a Digital loop carrier (DLC) and digital Private Branch Exchange systems. Bell Labs and Western Electric, the R&D and manufacturing arms of the original AT&T Bell System dominated the DLC markets with the SLC-96 and SLC series 5 systems prior to the 1984 Bell System divestiture. Digital Telephone Systems was purchased by Farinon Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Harris Corporation of Melbourne, Florida in 1980.

Genesis - Prior to the founding of Optilink, Don Green was the CEO of Digital Telephone Systems (DTS) until July 1987. DTS had been acquired twice during Don’s tenure, first by Farinon and then again by Harris Corporation. Tom Eames was a principal engineer, manager and system architect at DTS in 1987. In early 1987, Don Green approached Tom and asked him if he would technically evaluate a startup opportunity that had been presented to Don by Venture Capitalist (VC) business associates. Two entrepreneurs had approached the VCs with a business opportunity with the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC). The RBOCs had recently gone through divestiture from AT&T in 1984 and were looking at their future without Bell Labs. They had worked for Pacific Bell and a consulting company who Pacific Bell had hired to study their future strategy in the Access Network between the Central Office and customer premises. This consulting report had envisioned the future need for fiber in the Telco Access Network and described broadly an integrated and intelligent fiber terminal to replace the existing fiber multiplexing equipment and the Digital Loop Carrier (DLC). It further envisioned integration of work being done at Bellcore who was the RBOC’s new research group derived from Bell Labs. It suggested it must have dramatically enhanced integration, bandwidth, intelligence, standards compliance and performance. These entrepreneurs had made a very high level presentation of a system design to the VCs. Since it had been many years since Don was involved in system design, he asked Tom to meet with them for a presentation to evaluate their ideas at a hotel at the San Francisco Airport. Most of the presentation was slides taken from the consulting report reviewing the macro-opportunity followed by some simplistic architecture concept slides. Tom had just completed architecture and design work on the H20/20 Digital PABX. Both the market opportunity and a vision of the implementation seemed obvious in the H20/20 experience context. It was also clear the entrepreneurs had little system design experience. Tom returned from the meeting and reported to Don that this was an intriguing and fabulous opportunity and the DTS H20/20 team already had most of the expertise to realize the vision. Don returned this report to the VCs and Optilink was soon born.

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