Telecom Corridor, Richardson

The Telecom Corridor is a technology business center in Richardson, Texas, a northern suburb of Dallas, which contains over 25 million square feet of office space and accounts for over 130,000 jobs. Located in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and home to the University of Texas at Dallas, the Corridor is a strip about 6.5 miles long along U.S. Route 75, between President George Bush Turnpike and Interstate 635 and is often considered an area of the Silicon Prairie. More than 5,700 companies, including 600 technology companies are headquartered in the area, including significant players such as AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Verizon, Samsung, Texas Instruments, and MetroPCS. Some of these companies also have offices in Telecom Valley located in California. Although the Telecom Corridor was a booming area of Dallas's economy during the late 1990s, the dot-com bust of 2001 hit the region hard. However, it began recovering in 2004, and that recovery has since picked up momentum, gaining both the operations of many non-technology-related companies and many previously non-existent residential units designed in the New Urbanist style. The name "Telecom Corridor" is a registered trademark and may technically only be used to describe the area mentioned in this article. ()