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.
AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation, was an American telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies created following the breakup of the Bell System. Ameritech was acquired in 1999 by SBC Communications, which subsequently acquired AT&T Corporation in 2006, becoming the present-day AT&T.
A competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC), in the United States and Canada, is a telecommunications provider company competing with other, already established carriers, generally the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC).
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.
Bell Aliant Inc. is a brand name used by Bell Canada for telecommunications services in Atlantic Canada.
Mercury Communications was a national telephone company in the United Kingdom, formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless, to challenge the then-monopoly of British Telecom (BT). Although it proved only moderately successful at challenging BT's dominance, it led the way for new communication companies to attempt the same.
A naked DSL, also known as standalone or dry loop DSL, is a digital subscriber line (DSL) without a PSTN service — or the associated dial tone. In other words, only a standalone DSL Internet service is provided on the local loop.
Rochester Telephone Corporation was a company that provided local telephone service to Rochester, New York. The company was founded in 1920 as a merger of Rochester Telephonic Exchange and Rochester Telephone Company. In 1995 the company became Frontier Corporation, trading on the NYSE under the FRO symbol. Ownership passed to Global Crossing in 1999, and then, in 2001, to Citizens Utilities Corporation, which later changed its name to Frontier Communications.
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.
The Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone Company is a telecommunications company that provided 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. US West consolidated its three main operating subsidiaries, forming US West Communications, Inc. on January 1, 1991. PNB went out of operation three plus years following the mergers. 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.
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.
Comcast MO Group, Inc. is a telecommunications company created by US West Inc. in 1998 following US West's acquisition of Boston-based Continental Cable. The company combined Continental with Wometco/GTC, which US West had previously acquired. Wometco/GTC had adopted the MediaOne name a year earlier. Media One Group was acquired in 2000 by AT&T Broadband, which was subsequently acquired by Comcast in 2002.
AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's third largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest wireless carrier in the United States behind Verizon and T-Mobile. As of 2023, AT&T was ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations, with revenues of $122.4 billion.
Qwest Communications International, Inc. was a United States telecommunications carrier. Qwest provided local service in 14 western and midwestern U.S. states: Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
Matrix Telecom, Inc., operating as Matrix Business Technologies, Trinsic, Powered by Matrix, Excel Telecommunications and various other niche brands is a United States telecommunications firm that provides voice and data services to consumers and small and medium businesses as well as multi-location distributed enterprise markets. The firm also provides wholesale voice services to the telecommunications, wireless and cable industries.
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, which offers communications, network services, security, cloud solutions, voice and managed services through its fiber optic and copper networks, as well as its data centers and cloud computing services. The company has been included in the S&P 600 index since being removed from the S&P 500 in March 2023.
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.
The history of AT&T dates back to the invention of the telephone. The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell, who obtained the first US patent for the telephone, and his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Bell and Hubbard also established American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885, which acquired the Bell Telephone Company and became the primary telephone company in the United States. This company maintained an effective monopoly on local telephone service in the United States until anti-trust regulators agreed to allow AT&T to retain Western Electric and enter general trades computer manufacture and sales in return for its offer to split the Bell System by divesting itself of ownership of the Bell Operating Companies in 1982.
