1987 – 2026
A phone company that kept the receipts.
Advanced Communications was founded in Peoria in 1987. It sold phones over a counter, then installed systems in offices, and today runs them in the cloud as All-Tech Datacom. Three different businesses, on paper. One company, 39 years, one idea.
Every claim below is quoted from a page this company published, and every one links to the Internet Archive capture it was read from. Open them. That is what they are there for.
1987
A company with a thesis
The founding sentence never changed. It sat on the About page in 2003, and it was still there, word for word, thirteen years later:
“Advanced Communications was founded in 1987 in an effort to give small to mid-sized companies the same advantages that the larger-sized companies usually enjoy.”
That is still the whole business. A ten-person office gets the same equipment, the same certified technicians, and the same answer at 2am as a company with three hundred people. Everything that follows is just the technology changing underneath it.
2001 – 2005
The phone store
This is where the domain name comes from. The 2004 homepage explains it plainly: “In July of 2001, we introduced our Phone Center Store in the Sterling Plaza (in Peoria, Illinois).”
Behind it ran a real shop. An osCommerce catalogue at acphonecenter.com/catalog carried roughly 340 products across fourteen categories — trimline sets and headsets, cordless
handsets, two-way radios, novelty phones, and a whole section of special-needs telephones. You
could buy a red wall phone from us.
And the invitation on the homepage was one no phone company would write today: “please visit us at our storefront location, where you can try out a telephone before you purchase it.”
2007 – 2010
The Source For Communication Solutions
The catalogue gave way to a brochure site, built in Microsoft FrontPage, under a tagline the company would keep for the next eighteen years. A second line ran beneath the logo: “For All Your Telephone, Sound & Computer Needs.” The header carried three numbers — Peoria, Bloomington, and, for a couple of years, Chicago.
The storefront had moved to 2000 W. Pioneer Parkway, and the homepage gave directions by landmark: “across from O’Brien Mitsubishi.”
One promise on that 2007 page is worth reading twice, because it is the same promise on this site today, nineteen years later:
“We Offer 24 hour Emergency Support; to reach an on call tech please call our office and follow the prompts.”
2011 – 2016
The pivot, caught on camera
You can date the end of the retail business to a window of about fourteen months, because the Wayback Machine happened to photograph both sides of it.
In the February 2011 capture, the homepage still asks you to come in and try out a telephone before you buy it. In the April 2012 capture, that paragraph is gone. In its place:
“our job is to serve you, whether you need a service call, or a complete new system for your office.”
No more homes. No more novelty phones. From here on the customer is a business with a phone system, and the company is the one that installs it and keeps it running.
The About page from this era is the fullest statement the company ever published about itself — and every one of its four promises is still on the front of this site: technicians available 24 hours a day; maintenance formally classified into Major and Minor malfunctions, with guaranteed response times for both; ongoing support beyond installation and training at no additional charge during the warranty period; and, from a shop in central Illinois, a nationwide network of certified technicians.
What it sold, then
In this era Advanced Communications was a Panasonic Certified Dealer for the Super Hybrid Digital systems (KX-TDA, TDE and NCP), an authorised dealer of NEC telephone systems, and an independent distributor of AT&T / Lucent / Avaya equipment.
These are historical credentials, not current ones. The dealerships and distributorships on this page all ended. Today All-Tech Datacom installs 3CX and Yeastar, and services Panasonic systems — it does not sell new ones.
2017 – 2025
One word changes
The hand-cut tables were replaced by WordPress, and the slab-serif mark by a brush script. The homepage paragraph survived the move almost intact — but one name in it had been swapped out. The systems on offer were now “Panasonic, Digium, and Avaya”. NEC was gone; the open-source telephony that would become VoIP had arrived.
And then that page sat there. The copy did not change again for eight years. The Internet Archive’s last capture of it, in February 2025, shows the same words. It was not neglect so much as displacement: by then the actual work had moved somewhere the website never mentioned.
Today
All-Tech Datacom
The company trades now as All-Tech Datacom — VoIP Telecom Service. Most new systems are hosted VoIP on 3CX, some on Yeastar, and there is no longer a switch in anybody’s closet unless they want one.
The archive caught this happening too, quietly. In July 2024, while the old site still
advertised on-premise phone systems, the Wayback Machine captured a working hosted-PBX login
page running on pbx.atdc.biz — the platform, already live, on the company’s own domain. The website was the last
thing to catch up.
And the Panasonic systems from the certified-dealer years are still out there, still ringing, in offices whose owners cannot get anyone else to touch them. We still service them. That is not nostalgia. It is the same job as always: pick up, and go fix it.
Retail counter, then a truck, now the cloud.
The equipment has been replaced three times over in 39 years. The number you call has not.
Talk to usSources on this page are captures held by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine of acphonecenter.com and advancedphonesystems.com — the two domains this company published under between 2002 and 2025.