PACW PacWest Bancorp

Pac-West Telecomm Reaches Agreement With All Major Local Carriers in Its Footprint to Receive Reciprocal Compensation STOCKTON, Calif., Jan. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PACW), a provider of communications services in the western U.S., today announced that it has now successfully reached accords with all of the major incumbent local carriers in its footprint regarding implementation of the FCC's decision on October 8, 2004 to remove growth caps and the new market restrictions which limited reciprocal compensation for dial-up Internet traffic. Hank Carabelli, Pac-West's President and CEO, said, "We are very pleased to start 2005 having reached arrangements with SBC, Verizon, Qwest, and Sprint to cease the practice of withholding reciprocal compensation based on the ISP growth caps. We believe that this regulatory clarity, along with our recently announced agreement to sell our enterprise customer base and related debt reduction combine to put Pac-West on secure financial footing to pursue our strategy of enabling other communications providers to serve their end-users via Pac-West's network." John Sumpter, Pac-West's Vice President of Regulatory, commented, "This should end the uncertainty and inequality for competitive carriers serving ISP customers. Thankfully the FCC realized these restrictions were unhealthy for the industry and not in the public interest. We are pleased to have these restraints removed from our contracts." About Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. Founded in 1980 and first incorporated in 1981, Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. has been offering telephone service to its customers since 1982. Pac-West is currently one of the largest competitive local exchange carriers headquartered in California. Pac-West's network averages over 120 million minutes of voice and data traffic per day, and carries an estimated 20% of the dial-up Internet traffic in California. In addition to California, Pac-West has operations in Nevada, Washington, Arizona, and Oregon. For more information, please visit Pac-West's website at http://www.pacwest.com/. Forward-Looking Statements In this press release, our use of the words "outlook," "expect," "anticipate," "estimate," "forecast," "project," "likely," "objective," "plan," "designed," "goal," "target," and similar expressions is intended to identify forward-looking statements. While these statements represent our current judgment on what the future may hold, and we believe these judgments are reasonable, actual results may differ materially due to numerous important risk factors that are described in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2003, as filed with the SEC on March 30, 2004, which may be revised or supplemented in subsequent reports filed by us with the SEC. Such risk factors include, but are not limited to: our substantial indebtedness; an inability to generate sufficient cash to service our indebtedness; regulatory and legal uncertainty with respect to intercarrier compensation payments received by us; the declining rate at which intercarrier compensation payments are determined; the inability to expand our business as a result of the unavailability of funds to do so; adverse affects on our operations as a result of covenants in agreements related to our borrowings; the loss of key executive officers could negatively impact our business prospects; the possible delisting of our common shares from the Nasdaq SmallCap Market; and our principal competitors for local services and potential additional competitors have advantages that may adversely affect our ability to compete with them. DATASOURCE: Pac-West Telecomm, Inc. CONTACT: Reid Cox of Pac-West Telecomm, Inc., +1-209-926-3417, or Web site: http://www.pacwest.com/

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