The Telecom Council of Silicon Valley connects companies and individuals involved in the region's Communications Technology industry with one another for business development, collaboration, and education. Using our network, tools, framework, and meetings to bring together the local telecom industry's critical mass of businesses, research, ideas, capital, and human expertise – the Council is a hub for telecom professionals.

The telecom industry in Silicon Valley includes over 500 telecom companies, employs over 100,000 people, and has attracted more than twice the investment dollars than any other region in the US in 2011. How many of these companies do you know? Would your business benefit by knowing more of them? How can you possibly keep abreast of all the important innovation taking place in the Valley? The truth is that even though these companies and their key people are in the business of communications, the lines of communication between them are often closed. To address this gap, the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley was built by carriers, venture capitalists, and telecom infrastructure companies.

The Telecom Council is built around a legacy group called the Service Provider's Investment Forum (SPiF) that was formed informally in 2000 by Rob Hull of British Telecom, Ursula Oesterle of Swisscom, Rob Trice formerly of Nokia Venture Partners, and Ian Foley formerly of Telecom Italia Mobile as a monthly lunch discussion on telecom issues, hot startups and trends they were seeing in Silicon Valley. The group grew quickly and by 2002 had over 10 carriers attend regularly, had outgrown restaurants and moved into conference rooms, and was being organized by The Kerton Group. By 2004, we added quarterly meetings to include telecom vendors which added Samsung, Sony, Motorola, Qualcomm, and Intel's venture groups among others. By 2006, prominent local telecom VC Tim Chang had recognized the value of the SPiF to his portfolio companies, and he suggested that a regional association could well be built with the SPiF as the “anchor tenant”. Tim was instrumental in pushing The Kerton Group to draw up the plan that would allow the entire ecosystem of telecom companies to join together, much as the carriers had for the SPiF. Tim and Liz Kerton drew the first rough plan for the Council on a napkin at Michaels at Shoreline. In the fall of 2007, the plan was set in motion.

Today, re-badged as the Telecom Council of Silicon Valley, we have 5 Forums, including the original Service Provider Forum, and our membership has grown to include startups, VCs, infrastructure companies, and companies who are not based in Silicon Valley but work here regularly.

Our membership list is published here, and attendee lists for many of our meetings can be found by poking through our meeting archive.