About BWT

A Brief History

Baltimore-Washington Telephone Company was founded in 1991, in the early days of local exchange competition. Before the Telecommunications Act of 1996 made CLECs a household word (well, a household word if your household talked about telecom policy at dinner), BWT was already operating as one of the country’s first competitive carriers.

We got our start providing local exchange service in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Over the decades, as the industry evolved from TDM to IP, from physical colocation to cloud-based infrastructure, from paper tariffs to real-time APIs, we evolved with it. The company has been through every phase of the telecom industry’s transformation - and we’re still here.

What We Are

BWT is a small, independent CLEC. We hold our own OCN (8697). We file tariffs. We maintain interconnection agreements. We operate switching infrastructure. We do the things a telephone company does.

Our business is wholesale. We sell origination and termination services to other telephone companies, CLECs, VoIP providers, and qualified enterprise customers. We’re a carrier’s carrier.

What We’re Not

We’re not a consumer phone company. We don’t sell to end users. We don’t have a retail rate card or a support line for your grandmother’s landline.

We’re also not in the high-volume termination business. We don’t sell nationwide term. We don’t cater to dialers, call centers, or anyone looking to push short-duration traffic. There are companies that do that well. We’re not one of them, and we don’t want to be.

How We Work

We’re a small team. We know our customers by name. When you email us, a human reads it. When something breaks at 2 AM, the person who fixes it is the person who built it.

We believe in doing fewer things well. We’d rather have a clean network and solid relationships with twenty carriers than a messy network and a thousand customers we can’t support.

If that sounds like the kind of company you’d want to do business with, get in touch.