REGIS (BUD) BATES has more than 35 years of experience in telecommunications and management information systems (MIS). He oversees the operation of TC International Consulting, Inc., a full service management consulting organization. He has been involved in the design of major networks including LANs and WANs. His clients span the range of Fortune 100-500 companies. Many of his projects deal with multiple sites and countries using Frame Relay, ATM, and Optical architectures. He has also done a significant amount of work in the wireless communications area.

Bud also develops and conducts various public and in-house seminars ranging from a managerial overview to very technical instruction on voice, data, LAN, WAN, and broadband communications. For the past two years, he has devoted much of his development and training activities on the convergence of voice and data communications. Included in these developments, Bud has been training numerous CLECs on the integration of voice and data. He has recommended and implemented several training programs (in-house) using all the technologies that are converging as a base model. Included in this list are several training programs that carry the organization's internal certification. His many topics include both basic and advanced courseware on voice, data, LAN, WAN, ATM, SONET, T1/T3, VoIP, and Voice over Data Protocols (FR, ATM, and so on).