Summary form only given. Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) operating at 1.3 /spl mu/m are of great interest for optical interconnect and communication applications. It is desirable to grow VCSELs on GaAs substrates due to well developed DBRs, ease of processing and accessibility of the oxidation technology available in GaAs/AlGaAs. Recently, significant effort has been dedicated to development of 1.3 /spl mu/m emitting active regions on GaAs substrates. We report room temperature, pulsed operation of SQW compressively strained type-II GaAsSb-InGaAs edge emitting lasers grown by molecular beam epitaxy on GaAs substrates. All data is measured on broad area, gain guided structures at room temperature. For a 1500 /spl mu/m long and 75 /spl mu/m wide laser, lasing occurs at 1.29 /spl mu/m, although electroluminescence peaks near 1.36 /spl mu/m at low injection currents. Similar blue shifts have been observed in type II structures (Peter et al., 1998) or in compositionally modulated materials (Fouquet et al., 1990). For a 2000 /spl mu/m/spl times/100 /spl mu/m device, average threshold currents were found to be 0.75 A with an average threshold current density of 380 A/cm/sup 2/. We measured an average slope efficiency of 14%. The threshold current density extrapolated for an infinite resonator length (for a 75 /spl mu/m wide laser) was found to be 120 A/cm/sup 2/. We also measured the characteristic temperature T/sub 0/ for these lasers and found it to be 60 K.