Birch Communications Refinances Senior Credit Facility

ATLANTA, Oct. 2, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Birch Communications, Inc., a leading IP-based telecom and managed services provider to small- and medium-sized businesses, announced today that it has refinanced its senior credit facility with a substantial increase in available capital.  Union Bank also joins Bank of America, PNC, Wells Fargo, and CoBank in the credit with a commitment of $25 million.  Birch will use a portion of the proceeds to pay off its subordinated indebtedness and to fund the acquisition of selected assets of Lightyear Network Solutions.

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"We are very pleased to begin a partnership with Union Bank and are impressed with their expertise and knowledge of financing in our industry," noted Edward James, Birch's chief financial officer.  "This refinancing is transformative.  We have increased our access to capital to take advantage of the numerous growth opportunities in front of us and we are significantly lowering our costs of borrowing."

"This additional funding enables Birch to continue to grow its business and is also confirmation of our overall business strategy and our ability to execute it.  We're proud of our management team, the Birch family of employees and our banking partners who continue to increase their support," said Vincent M. Oddo, Birch's president and chief executive officer. "I am pleased that this funding will allow us to continue to seek accretive acquisitions, expand our proprietary IP-network and support the expansion of our products and services to better serve our large and growing base of customers."

About Birch Communications
Headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., Birch Communications provides IP-based communications and cloud services to small and medium-sized businesses in select metropolitan areas across the United States. Birch services include: local and long distance voice, broadband Internet access, T1, PRI, bonded T1/ PRI, DSL, ADSL 2+, SIP Trunking, hosted PBX, hosted e-mail, hosted applications, collocation services, visual voicemail, wireless voice, wireless data and many other communications and cloud services. Birch voice and broadband services are, in most cases, delivered using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology on the Company's secure IP-Network rather than over the public Internet.

According to Inc. 500|5000 magazine in its 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2004 rankings, Birch was one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. In 2010, Birch was also named the 7th fastest growing private business in Atlanta, and in 2011 as one of the Top 100 Private Companies in Atlanta, by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. Please visit www.birch.com for more information.

SOURCE Birch Communications