The founding member companies were looking to concentrate on the telecommunications needs of our respective member companies in northern New Jersey , which felt neglected by the telephone operating company and CLECs.  Member companies included: KPMG, Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany, Datascope, Exxon, Jaguar, Warner-Lambert, SONY Electronics, UPS, Paine Webber, New Jersey Transit, ADP, Volvo Financial, EXTEL, MERK, Toys'R US, A&P, Medical Economics, Union Camp, Hertz, Sharp, Novartis, and others.

Using this large group of member companies to leverage with Bell Atlantic (our only Telco choice at the time) we were able collectively bargain for the installation of a fiber-optic network, for a small fraction of what classical microwave and copper cable would have been, from an out-of-area Bell central office. These business-critical features provided a platform for diverse routing providing a real disaster recovery solution for telecommunications traffic.

This effort took several years to accomplish. After NNJTG proved the customer base, Bell Atlantic needed to justify the business case internally as well as by the NJ Public Utilities as a special service and finally execute the build-out of the network. Several companies currently make use of this diverse routing network since it’s installation of the regional SONET network.

Since then we have still pursued local access competition in the Northern NJ area, with companies such as Metropolitan Fiber Systems, Teleport Communications Group, Time Warner Telecommunications, AT&T Local Service, and Con Edison. Several of these companies had approval of their business cases for building into this area, and a couple of companies had obtained rights-of-way and started construction. However, subsequent mergers with larger companies pushed these projects off track. AT&T has been the one success story with implementation of the 'Bergen Build' finally offering competitive local access services to certain areas within Bergen County, NJ and to some of our member companies, including UPS. We are still talking to other companies and expect that this effort will continue  to be a long-term issue within our organization.

A lthough our original focus was on member companies from Northern NJ , we have since allowed membership from all companies in New Jersey or nearby states with interests in New Jersey . We have pushed for keeping the organization as informal as possible without any dues, or membership application. All telecommunications staff from supervisors to managers, to executives can join free-of-charge. The costs of our meetings are picked up by the presenting companies, which are sometimes members of our group.