Bankrupt one year and purchased the next … that’s CommPartners’ Hosted Services to Momentum Telecom and its carrier side to Point1. Russian mobile giant with subscribers in South Asia, Russia, Africa and Middle East buys a tiny mobile sleeper.

Ask anyone in the Open Source and telecommunications community around the globe who CommPartners is? A typical answer would be, “Oh, they are the ones key to keeping http://www.voip-info.org going.” Another … “aren’t they based in Las Vegas?” CommPartners has had some all time lows including filing bankruptcy in 2010. The 6th of May was a high, Momentum Telecom is buying CommPartners’ hosted services.

Momentum Telecom is a telecommunications company who sells white label voice services (rebranding their own voice services for others to start their business) and broadband management. Their customers are USA cable operators, city governments, and some managed services providers. Why buy CommPartners’ hosted services? They have 200 reseller customers? Annual revenues of 77 million USD? Low investment, high returns? Popularity? Momentum was not the only looking to buy CommPartners’ assets.

“Our management team identified an excellent opportunity to acquire the assets of another digital voice provider for financially favorable terms, giving us the ability to grow our customer base, leverage significant core technology assets to the advantage of current and future customers, and continue building leadership in this space,” said Momentum CEO Alan Creighton. “We have invested heavily in the supporting applications and processes to scale our hosted IP telephony business, putting Momentum in a perfect position to acquire smaller companies that need capital infusions to continue servicing customers.”

TMCnet blogger Peter Radizeski indicated that CommPartners problems stemmed from problems over access charges and its reluctance to appropriately adjust its pricing in light of such issues. Radizeski wrote at the time: “An inside source reminds me that, ‘It’s a Chapter 11 re-organization, not liquidation. Caused by an FCC that has been afraid to tackle inter-carrier compensation reform and by greedy ILECs that act as if they are entitled to inflated access charges. … they will emerge stronger post re-org.’”

(Corrections made after discussion with Peter Radizeski.)

Other recent acquisitions and announcements include. TelePacific Communications, the largest California-based CLEC providing integrated voice and data telecommunications services to the small and medium-sized business (“SMB”) customer segment in California and Nevada … will buy Telekenex, a business-grade IP services provider headquartered in San Francisco and Seattle.

VimpelCom Ltd., who has over 181 million mobile subscribers, signed the required documents to acquire 100% of the shares of Open Joint-Stock Company “New Telephone Company” (“NTC”) from KT Corporation and Summit Telecom Global Management B.V., subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, and a leading mobile operator in the Primorskiy region of Russia. Acquisition price $420 million USD.

Are there formulas here that others can follow in order to get acquired and crawl out from under all the pressure? Russia looks hot. Our Russian telco Konstantin told us that three years ago at ITEXPO West that Russia was about to have a lot of money to spend.

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