Although NeuStar may disagree with its characterization as a "plumber" of the telecom world, it certainly won't mind a recent article in Fortune drawing comparisons of it to Cisco. NeuStar provides a host of essential services to phone companies, including operating the clearing house for phone numbers and administrating area codes in North America.
By the numbers, NeuStar has a market cap of around $1.25 billion and last year's annual sales were $489 million. The company has branched out beyond phone numbers and runs domain name registry services for the .biz, .tel, and .us domains, among others, resulting in about a quarter of the world's Internet transactions passing through one of NeuStar's databases.
To focus more on Internet-related business, NeuStar has renegotiated its telecom contracts to a fixed-fee system with gradual price increases every year; however, the contract encourages telecom customers to contribute IP data to NeuStar's database, since some IP services are bundled into the new contracts.
For more:
- Fortune via CNN Money. Article.
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