Finger Lakes Technologies Group is a five-generation, family owned company whose roots trace back nearly 100 years to the independent Ontario & Trumansburg Telephone companies.
Paul Griswold, the great-grandson of the telecom founder, started the company in 1995 as a dial-up Internet services provider.
By 2000, FLTG began partnering with CISCO Systems to sell and deploy technology solutions in the local market.
In 2005, amid regulatory changes to the industry, all of the family’s business enterprises merged into the FLTG brand – providing an opportunity to form a competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC). The move allowed the company to compete outside their traditional boundaries – paving the way for significant growth.
FLTG’s success has been largely attributed to its focus on rural markets — where they cater to small community assets like colleges and hospitals.
Since their initial contract with Cornell University (a project that involved 100 miles of fiber to connect Ithaca-Geneva-Rochester), FTLG has built a fiber network that now comprises more than 2500 miles of high-speed connection lines.
To date, the company has invested more than $41 million to build-out communities across upstate New York. As their lines are usually the only access to rural communities – larger competitors are now forced to buy directly from FLTG in order to access these markets.
Prior to FLTG becoming a CLEC business, Griswold oversaw the purchase of 700 acres of the former Seneca Army Depot (known as the “Q” area). Today, the site provides backup data storage for both paper and electronic records in highly-secured, concrete igloos (a service known as co-location disaster recovery). Soon, work will begin on the second co-location bunker as the niche market continues to grow.
FLTG was recently named one of the top companies to work for in NYS and was also the recipient of the Democrat & Chronicle’s “Top Work Places” award in 2016.
