List of United States telephone companies

This is a list of United States telephone companies.

Regional Bell Operating 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:

• AT&T: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin
• Verizon: Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia
• Lumen Technologies: Bell System (RBOC) lines (from Qwest) in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, Wyoming.
• Frontier Communications: owns the ex-Bell System ILEC areas in Connecticut and West Virginia.
• Consolidated Communications operates ex-Bell exchanges in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, which it gained from its acquisition of FairPoint, which had acquired them from Verizon.

Other major local exchange carriers

In the following states and regions, the primary local carrier (LEC) is not an RBOC:

• Lumen Technologies, in addition to its role as the BOC in the areas of 14 states gained from its acquisition of Qwest, Lumen serves other non-ex-Bell local exchanges in those states, as well as some in Florida and the Las Vegas metropolitan area in Nevada.
• Brightspeed was formed in 2022 when Lumen sold its landline operations in 20 states outside its core area (and Florida). ^[1]
• Frontier Communications, in addition to its role as the BOC for West Virginia, now serves mainly rural and some suburban and smaller city areas in 27 other states (many formerly part of the GTE ILEC system purchased from Verizon) including parts of Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin.
• Windstream, founded in 2006 with the spinoff of Alltel's wireline division and simultaneous merger with Valor Telecom, serves mainly rural areas in 29 states.
• Consolidated Communications, in addition to its RBOC functions in Northern New England, also serves rural areas in 22 states. ^[2]
• Telephone and Data Systems, (through its subsidiary TDS) serves mainly rural areas in parts of 36 states. ^[3]
• Altafiber, formerly known as Cincinnati Bell, which serves the Cincinnati metropolitan area, and Hawaii (due to its ownership of Hawaiian Telcom). ^[4] It was not included in the Bell System breakup of 1984 because the original AT&T held only a minority stake in that company.
• Verizon, in addition to its role as a RBOC in its areas retained in the East, serves former GTE areas in Pennsylvania and Virginia. Verizon formerly served ex-GTE areas in parts of California, Florida and Texas before selling to Frontier Communications in 2016.
• Claro Puerto Rico, which serves every exchange in Puerto Rico, has been owned by the international telecommunications giant América Móvil since 2007.
• Ziply Fiber, which serves ex-GTE areas in the Pacific Northwest that they bought from Frontier.

Many other individual communities or smaller regions are also served by non-RBOC companies.

See also

• Lists of public utilities
• List of Canadian telephone companies

Notes

1. "Lumen completes $7.5bn sale of operations in 20 states to Brightspeed". October 4, 2022.
2. "Service Area Locations - Consolidated Communications". www.consolidated.com.
3. "TDS 2016 Annual Report" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on February 4, 2018.
4. "Cincinnati Bell acquires two peers for $851M".