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.
A terrestrial network is a group of radio stations, television stations, or other electronic media outlets, that form an agreement to air, or broadcast, content from a centralized source. For example, ABCTooltip American Broadcasting Company and NBCTooltip National Broadcasting Company (U.S.), CBC/Radio-CanadaTooltip Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Canada), the BBCTooltip British Broadcasting Corporation (UK), the ABCTooltip Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia), ARDTooltip ARD (broadcaster) (Germany), PTVTooltip People's Television Network (Philippines), KBSTooltip Korean Broadcasting System, and NHK (Japan) are TV networks that provide programming for local terrestrial television station affiliates to air using signals that can be picked up by the home television sets of local viewers. Networks generally, but not always, operate on a national scale; that is, they cover an entire country.
Cincinnati Bell, Inc., 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.
The monopoly position of the Bell System in the U.S. was ended on January 8, 1982. AT&T Corporation proposed by in a consent decree to relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided local telephone service in the United States. 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.
Verizon New York, Inc., formerly The New York Telephone Company (NYTel), was organized in 1896, taking over the New York City operations of the American Bell Telephone Company.
The Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company is a telecommunications company that provides local telecommunications services in Oregon, Washington, and northern Idaho. Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company was formed on July 1, 1961, when it was spun off from the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company. It was the local exchange carrier for the Bell System, the AT&T Corporation-controlled network of companies. On January 1, 1984, Pacific Northwest Bell was split from AT&T as ordered in the settlement of United States v. AT&T and became a subsidiary of the newly formed Regional Bell Operating Company US West. Pacific Northwest Bell became dormant when US West consolidated its three main operating subsidiaries, forming US West Communications, Inc. on January 1, 1991. US West merged with Qwest Communications International Inc. in 2000, and the US West brand was replaced by the Qwest brand. Qwest Communications merged with Louisiana-based CenturyLink in 2011, and the Qwest brand was replaced by the CenturyLink brand. It now does business with the Lumen Technologies brand as of 2020.
Verizon New England, Inc. is a Bell Operating Company that once covered most of New England but now only serves most of Massachusetts and all of Rhode Island. It was formerly the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, more commonly known as New England Telephone, which for seven decades served most of the New England area of the United States as a part of the original AT&T. New England Telephone's original coverage area included Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont as well as Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Verizon has sold off service in the northern three states, which as of 2020 were served by Consolidated Communications.
Qwest Corporation is a Regional Bell Operating Company owned by Lumen Technologies. It was originally named Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company, later becoming known as Mountain Bell, then US West Communications, Inc. from 1991 to 2000. It includes the former operations of Malheur Bell, Northwestern Bell and Pacific Northwest Bell as well.
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.
FairPoint Communications, Inc. was an American operator of communication services. FairPoint's services include local and long-distance phone service, data, Internet, broadband, television, business communications solutions and fiber services. Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, it served 31 markets in 17 states, mostly in rural areas. FairPoint, along with Frontier Communications, had been at the forefront of acquiring Verizon landline operations.
Consolidated Communications of Northern New England Company, LLC is a Bell Operating Company founded in 2006. It is a subsidiary of Consolidated Communications and operates telephone lines in Maine and New Hampshire formerly served by Verizon New England.
AT&T refers to several related companies providing telecommunications 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.
AT&T Corporation, an abbreviation for its former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was an American telecommunications company that provided voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agencies.
Telex is a telecommunication service that provides text-based message exchange over the circuits of the public switched telephone network or by private lines. The technology operates on switched station-to-station basis with teleprinter devices at the receiving and sending locations. Telex was a major method of sending text messages electronically between businesses in the post–World War II period. Its usage went into decline as the fax machine grew in popularity in the 1980s.
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.
Consolidated Communications of Vermont Company, LLC is a telephone operating company owned by Consolidated Communications of Northern New England, a subsidiary of Consolidated Communications.
Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T. It does business as other d.b.a. names in its operating region, which includes Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and portions of Illinois. The company is currently headquartered in Dallas, Texas at One AT&T Plaza.
Pacific Telecom, Inc., originally Telephone Utilities, Inc. and now CenturyTel of the Northwest, Inc., was an independent telephone company that owned over 600,000 telephone lines in 12 states prior to its acquisition by CenturyTel.
