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This is a list of United States telephone companies.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(July 2010) |
This is a list of United States telephone companies.
The Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) are the result of the break-up of the Bell System in 1984. After numerous mergers, asset sales, and renamings since the break-up, these are the current successor RBOCs:
In the following states and regions, the primary local carrier (ILEC) is not an RBOC:
Many other individual communities or smaller regions are also served by non-RBOC companies.
GTE Corporation, formerly General Telephone & Electronics Corporation (1955–1982), was the largest independent telephone company in the United States during the days of the Bell System. The company operated from 1926, with roots tracing further back than that, until 2000, when it was acquired by Bell Atlantic; the combined company took the name Verizon.
A Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC) was a corporate entity created as result of the antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice against the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1974 and settled in the Modification of Final Judgment on January 8, 1982.
An incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) is a local telephone company which held the regional monopoly on landline service before the market was opened to competitive local exchange carriers, or the corporate successor of such a firm.
Cincinnati Bell, doing business as Altafiber, is a regional telecommunications service provider based in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. It provides landline telephone, fiber-optic Internet, and IPTV services through its subsidiaries Altafiber Home Phone and Hawaiian Telcom, which are the incumbent local exchange carriers for the Greater Cincinnati metropolitan area and Hawaii. Other subsidiaries provide enterprise information technology services and long distance calling.
Cellular One is the trademarked brand name that licenses services used by several cellular service providers in the United States. The brand was sold to Trilogy Partners by AT&T in 2008 shortly after AT&T had completed its acquisition of Dobson Communications. Cellular One was originally the trade name of one of the first mobile telephone service providers.
The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by a consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the United States. This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long-distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), nicknamed the "Baby Bells", would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric.
Hawaiian Telcom, Inc., is the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) or dominant local telephone company, serving the state of Hawaii. In 2005, Hawaiian Telcom Holdco, Inc., was formed by The Carlyle Group, following its purchase of the Hawaiian Telcom Inc. assets of Verizon Communications. On July 2, 2018, Cincinnati Bell purchased Hawaiian Telcom Holdco, Inc. for $650 Million,
Verizon South, Inc. is a Verizon operating company providing local telephone services to portions of Virginia and North Carolina in the United States.
Frontier California, Inc. is a Frontier Communications-owned operating company providing telephone service in former Verizon regions. This included Southern California cities such as Long Beach, Seal Beach, Lakewood, Norwalk and Santa Monica.
Frontier Midstates, Inc. is a telephone operating company of Frontier Communications serving Indiana and Michigan. It was originally owned by Contel, and later purchased by GTE, Verizon, and then sold to Frontier.
Claro is the largest telecommunications company in the Dominican Republic and provides local, long-distance, and wireless voice services, as well as Internet and IPTV services, to approximately four million customers.
Claro Puerto Rico is one of the largest telecommunications services company in Puerto Rico. It is headquartered in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, and has operated for almost a century offering voice, data, long distance, broadband, directory publishing and wireless services for the island residents and businesses. It was founded by the Behn brothers, Sosthenes and Hernan. Originally, Puerto Rico Telephone Company eventually spawned ITT Corporation, which was founded by Sosthenes Behn. The company was a public corporation of the government of Puerto Rico for many years until the majority stakes were acquired by GTE in the mid-1990s. It was a subsidiary of Verizon Communications until it was fully acquired by América Móvil in 2007.
Frontier Communications Parent, Inc. is an American telecommunications company. Known as Citizens Utilities Company until 2000, Citizens Communications Company until 2008, and Frontier Communications Corporation until 2020, as a communications provider with a fiber-optic network and cloud-based services, Frontier offers broadband internet, digital television, and computer technical support to residential and business customers in 25 states. In some areas it also offers home phone services.
The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over 100 years from its creation in 1877 until its antitrust breakup in 1983. The system of companies was often colloquially called Ma Bell, as it held a vertical monopoly over telecommunication products and services in most areas of the United States and Canada. At the time of the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s, it had assets of $150 billion and employed over one million people.
Lumen Technologies, Inc. is an American telecommunications company headquartered in Monroe, Louisiana, that offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice, and managed services. The company was a member of the Fortune 500 and the S&P 500 index until 2023. Its communications services include local and long-distance voice, broadband, Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), private line, Ethernet, hosting, data integration, video, network, public access, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), information technology, and other ancillary services. Lumen also serves global enterprise customers across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific.
Frontier West Virginia, Inc. is one of the original Bell Operating Companies and provides local telephone service in the U.S. state of West Virginia.
Frontier Communications ILEC Holdings, Inc. is a company created by Verizon Communications in 2009.
Embarq Missouri, Inc. was a telephone operating company providing local telephone services in Kansas and Missouri owned by BrightSpeed.