Dallas, Pa.-Based Commonwealth Telephone is Branching Out

Oct. 20–Commonwealth Telephone Co. isn’t well known to most people in central Pennsylvania unless they happen to live in northern Dauphin County or the Lewisberry area, where it’s the local telephone company.

Based in Dallas, Pa., Commonwealth has 1,200 employees and reported $336 million in revenues in 2003. Its territory is in the eastern half of Pennsylvania and, like some of the state’s other small telephone companies, is scattered here and there. In the two midstate areas it serves, Commonwealth has 35,000 customers.

Despite being much smaller than Verizon Communications, the state’s telecommunications giant, Commonwealth has kept up with modern technology. According to David Weselcouch, vice president of investor relations, 75 percent to 80 percent of customers within three miles of a Commonwealth switch can get DSL broadband Internet service.

“We think we’ve tracked other players,” he said when asked how many of those potential customers subscribe to DSL service. “We’re in the high single digits in penetration of capable homes. And we are adding remote terminals.”

Commonwealth also has a competitive subsidiary, CTSI, which serves mainly business customers in three areas of the state. Harrisburg is one, Lancaster-Reading-York is another, and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre is the third.

Weselcounch said CTSI has invested $50 million in the Harrisburg market since 1998 and is pleased with the return.

He said the company is studying how best to cope with the future of the telecommunications industry, particularly the impact of Voice Over Internet Protocol telephone service, known as VOIP.

Internet phone service has good and bad points — it’s cheaper, for one thing — and could draw some customers away from traditional service.

Commonwealth is looking at a possible alliance with one of the satellite television companies to offer video services to subscribers. It’s also considering providing video-on-demand on its own.

But an alliance with DirecTV is a more likely scenario, although Weselcouch said no announcement is planned soon.

Another possible new service is wireless telephone service in partnership with an existing wireless carrier.

“All those things are possible for a company like ours,” he said. “We want to be a strong competitor with the cable companies. We have 32 small cable companies in our footprint and 70 percent of our footprint has a choice between cable modem and DSL.”

Commonwealth Telephone was owned by the Sardoni family of Wilkes-Barre from 1928 to 1993, when it was sold by the family to the company that became Level 3 Communications. Level 3 controlled it until this past January. It remains a publicly traded company.

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