Robert J. Pommer – Founder & CEO

About

Bob is an energetic telecom industry executive and entrepreneur. For the last 25 years, Bob’s experiences in sales, operations, and vendor management has given him a unique understanding of how all facets of the telecom industry work.  Over his career, Bob’s deep technical, contractual, operational, and sales experience has enabled him to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.

Prior to founding Optelcon in 2003, Bob was the Co-founder, COO, board Vice Chairman and Secretary of Universal Access. In the span of 5 years, Universal Access grew from a 5-person firm to being a publicly-traded telecom carrier with over $250M in revenues, 400 employees, and a market cap in excess of $5B.
Bob took on many roles as the company’s needs evolved. One of these roles was vendor management.  From the beginning, Bob developed and executed Universal Access’ wholesale network purchasing strategy. During this time, Bob negotiated and renegotiated over $700M in telecom agreements and enabled Universal Access to maintain one of the highest wholesale profit margins in the industry.  To solve the industry’s problem of getting accurate circuit quotes to specific buildings, Bob co-develop and patented (Patent number US 2002/0065669) the industry’s first multi-vendor, circuit design, least cost pricing, quoting, ordering, and provisioning system. This system reduced the industry avg. installation time frames by more than 50%.  Bob also co-designed and managed the construction of 15 colocation facilities and testified before various state commissions to establish Universal Access as a CLEC in all 50 States.

Prior to Universal Access, Bob was a top national account executive for a large telecom master agency business, (Arista Communications), The nation’s first CLEC,  TCG (Teleport Communications Group), and the British telecom carrier, Cable & Wireless.