McLeodUSA, based in Hiawatha, Iowa

Hiawatha, Iowa

Hiawatha is a city in Linn County, Iowa, United States. It is a suburb located north of Cedar Rapids and is part of the Cedar Rapids Metropolitan Statistical Area...

, is one of the nation’s largest independent competitive local exchange carrier

Competitive local exchange carrier

A competitive local exchange carrier , in the United States, is a telecommunications provider company competing with other, already established carriers ....

s (CLECs). The company also has offices in Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Tulsa is the second-largest city in the state of Oklahoma and 46th-largest city in the United States. With a population of 391,906 as of the 2010 census, it is the principal municipality of the Tulsa Metropolitan Area, a region with 937,478 residents in the MSA and 988,454 in the CSA. Tulsa's...

, and The Woodlands, Texas

The Woodlands, Texas

The Woodlands is a master-planned community and a Census-designated place in the U.S. state of Texas within the metropolitan area. The population of the CDP was 55,649 at the 2000 census—a 90 percent increase over its 1990 population. According to the 2010 census, The Woodlands' population rose...

.

McLeodUSA provides integrated communications services, including local services, in 25 Midwest

Midwestern United States

The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....

, Southwest

Southwestern United States

The Southwestern United States is a region defined in different ways by different sources. Broad definitions include nearly a quarter of the United States, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah...

, Northwest

Northwestern United States

The Northwestern United States comprise the northwestern states up to the western Great Plains regions of the United States, and consistently include the states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, to which part of southeast Alaska is also sometimes included...

 and Rocky Mountain

Mountain States

thumb|300px|Regional definitions vary from source to source. The states shown in dark red are always included, while the striped states are usually considered part of the same region called the Mountain States....

 states. The company is a facilities

Telecommunications facility

In telecommunications, a facility is defined by Federal Standard 1037C as:# A fixed, mobile, or transportable structure, including all installed electrical and electronic wiring, cabling, and equipment and all supporting structures, such as utility, ground network, and electrical supporting...

-based
telecommunications provider with, as of September 30, 2005, 38 ATM

Asynchronous Transfer Mode

Asynchronous Transfer Mode is a standard switching technique designed to unify telecommunication and computer networks. It uses asynchronous time-division multiplexing, and it encodes data into small, fixed-sized cells. This differs from approaches such as the Internet Protocol or Ethernet that...

 switches, 38 voice switches

Telephone exchange

In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls...

, 697 collocations

Colocation

Colocation is the act of placing multiple entities within a single location.Colocation is often used in the data sourcing industry to mean off-site data storage, usually in a data center. This is very important for businesses since the loss of data can be crucial for companies of any size...

, 432 DSLAMs and approximately 1,700 employees.

The company was founded by Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

 school teacher Clark McLeod who entered into the long distance re-sale business. Eventually he sold that business and went into Local Exchange Carrier

Local exchange carrier

Local Exchange Carrier is a regulatory term in telecommunications for the local telephone company.In the United States, wireline telephone companies are divided into two large categories: long distance and local...

 (LEC), using the State of Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

 funded fiber

Optical fiber

An optical fiber is a flexible, transparent fiber made of a pure glass not much wider than a human hair. It functions as a waveguide, or "light pipe", to transmit light between the two ends of the fiber. The field of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of...

 backbone as a helpful parallel. The company went public during the dot com boom, entered Chapter 11, reorganized, and then met the same fate a few years later. The company no longer trades on NASDAQ

NASDAQ

The NASDAQ Stock Market, also known as the NASDAQ, is an American stock exchange. "NASDAQ" originally stood for "National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations". It is the second-largest stock exchange by market capitalization in the world, after the New York Stock Exchange. As of...

 exchange. At one point the company had a market value in the billions. The former CEO was Chris A. Davis.

On March 22, 2007, the company filed a prospectus with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for another initial public offering

Initial public offering

An initial public offering or stock market launch, is the first sale of stock by a private company to the public. It can be used by either small or large companies to raise expansion capital and become publicly traded enterprises...

 (IPO).
On September 17, 2007, PAETEC Holding Corp.

PAETEC Holding Corp.

PAETEC Holding Corp. is a FORTUNE 1000 telecommunications company headquartered in Perinton, New York, USA. It was founded as the private company PaeTec Communications, Inc. in 1998 by its current CEO, Arunas A. Chesonis...

announced plans to acquire McLeodUSA in an all-stock merger for $557 million.