TELECOM Digest Sat, 7 Jan 2006 02:15:00 EST Volume 25 : Issue 9 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson GTE, Sprint, United, Centel, Contel, Nextel, etc. (Anthony Bellanga) Long Distance Dialarounds (Anthony Bellanga) Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 14:13:40 -0700 From: Anthony Bellanga TELECOM Digest Editor wrote: >> The (S)outhern (P)acific (R)ailroad (I)nternal (N)etwork >> (T)elecommunications Department of that railroad -- or S.P.R.I.N.T. >> for short -- did a major re-build of their trackside telephone >> system in the late 1960's. They did such a good job of it, they had >> a huge anount of left-over capacity and decided to lease it out to >> other businesses and companies. That was the original Sprint, which >> a few years later got into residential telecom service as well, and >> has now -- 2005 -- gone through many changes in ownership and >> management. About 1998 or so, Sprint bought the United Telephone >> Company which serves a lot of northern Kansas among other >> territories. PAT] > BZZZZZT! Sorry, Pat, it was the other way around! > United Telephone, based in the Kansas City, KS area (maybe Overland > Park) bought SPRINT and then assumed the name, much like the recent > changes at SBC/AT&T. > United Telephone owned numerous local operating telephone companies > around the US of A. In my area it was United Telephone of the > Northwest. There was a United Telephone of Ohio, United Telephone of > Florida, and others with the "United Telephone of..." name. There > were still others as well, like Carolina Telephone, which operated in > North and South Carolina. Possibly the largest city in SPRINT's > stable in Las Vegas, NV. Southern Pacific Railways began to offer "common carrier" telecom services (SPRINT) during the 1970s era, paralleling what MCI had also begun doing. At first, it was private line services, but over time, combinations of private line with switched long haul services emerged, and finally "fully switched" OCC (Other Common Carrier) services. In the early 1980s, GTE bought out SPRINT from Southern Pacific Railways. In the early 1980s, their 950-xxxx feature group 'B' dial-up access number was 950-0777, the '777' for 'SPR', and their initial post-divestiture feature group 'D' equal-access dial-around code was 10-777. Also happening during the early 1980s was that the independent telco group owner United (which was one of about four or five or six of the larger ones, the others being GTE, Contel, Centel, and also Alltel, CenturyTel, PTI, etc) was developing their own 'OCC' long-distance network called "US Telecom". Their access number was (is) 950-1033, and their dial-around was 10-333 (now 101-0333). In 1986, GTE and United decided to "join forces" and merge their OCC long-distance networks. The new joint-venture would be called "US Sprint", owned 50/50 by GTE and United. It would take some time for the networks and billing departments of "US Sprint" to be properly merged and operating "seamlessly". In the first couple of years of "US Sprint", there were numerous billing errors! (Not that they didn't have significant billing errors or broken promises throughout the 1990s as well!). After a year or two of the "US Sprint" joint-venture of GTE and United, GTE suddenly announced that they "wanted out" of Sprint. It was decided that over the next five or so years, that United would slowly buy out GTE's ownership of "US Sprint". So, every year, if you read the reports of who owned what, United would have larger shares of Sprint, and GTE would have less. By 1992 or so, GTE had completely exited Sprint, with United owning all of Sprint. Also about the same time, GTE and Continental Telephone (Contel) merged, with the GTE name surviving. There were long time Contel service areas sold off, as well as some long-time GTE service areas sold off too, to comply with antitrust laws. Alltel and Citizens Tel bought up these one-time GTE and Contel service areas. There were also a few Alltel areas that were sold to GTE at the same time, sort of a "swap" of some GTE/Contel and Alltel areas! Also during the 1992/93 time period, United also bought out Central Telephone (Centel). Some legacy Centel areas included Tallahassee FL, large areas of Virginia, parts of Illinois (including the one-time Step-by-Step Chicago suburbs of Park Ridge and Des Plaines, later sold in 1996 to Illinois Bell/Ameritech now SBC/AT&T), and the Las Vegas NV Metro area. The combined United (which now owned 100% of Sprint) with Centel, changed its name to Sprint around 1993. The Sprint Local Telco areas of southern, central, and also scattered in parts of northern Florida is mostly all legacy United. Tallahassee FL and a few other areas of northwestern (panhandle) FL are legacy Centel. Sprint has also become involved in Cellular. Sprint-Canada was a marketing name of Call-Net (Canada), a CLEC and Canadian-based OCC (competitive Long Distance carrier). More recently, Rogers (which at one time was in a venture with the old Unitel, also once known as AT&T-Canada), has bought out Call-Net in Canada. I think that the Rogers name will replace the Sprint-Canada and the Call-Net names. Earlier in 2005, Sprint bought out Nextel wireless. It's going to take some time before the Nextel name is completely replaced with the Sprint name, but Sprint did announce that it was retaining wireless and long distance. The legacy incumbent local telco operation (once known as United and Centel) is going to be spun-off to a new entity altogather but the name of this entity is still TBA. At the time that Sprint tookover Nextel, the red/white "diamond" logo (in use since 1986 with the GTE and United joint-venture of US-Sprint) was abandoned (although it will take time for embedded advertizing signage, etc. to be completely replaced), the new Sprint-Nextel logo being black, with black text, on a yellow background (similar to pre-merger Nextel), the black logo itself now being something that looks like bird-feathers fuffling or book-pages being rifled. So, Sprint has had quite a colorful history dating back over 30 years. And I'm defining Sprint by the OCC long distance aspect of the company and name. Its one time owner United has a history that does indeed go back over 100 years, as an independent local telephone company that seems to have begun in the Kansas area in the 1890s or early 1900s. And it was around 1992/93 (NOT 1998), that United changed its name to Sprint, since United now owned all 100% of Sprint, in the transition completely from GTE ownership over to United ownership. - anthony bellanga ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 06 Jan 2006 15:19:04 -0700 From: Anthony Bellanga Reply-To: no-spam@no-spam.no-spam Subject: Long Distance Dialarounds PAT: Please do NOT display my email address where ever it might appear! On Thursday 5 Jan 2006, Mark Crispin wrote in "Re: Cost of POTS w/o Long Distance": > With Qwest in Washington State, the only way of getting out of having > to pay a monthly fee for long-distance access is to sign up for > something called "Managed Long Distance", which prohibits you from > using 10xxx and 10xxxxx numbers and international dialing. The old 10-XXX+ Long Distance Dialaround code format is totally obsolete now. It was replaced by the expanded 101-XXXX+ code format over a phased period in the 1990s. Those previously assigned 10-XXX codes were permissively dialable as 101-0XXX, or the "so-called" 10-10-XXX or "ten-ten". However, that is a misnomer, since there were also 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes in use during the transition, since it turned out that under the shorter, older format, there had never been any 10-10X codes, nor 10-15X or 10-16X codes. Thus, permissive use of 101-0XXX and new 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes didn't conflict. By 1998 in the US, and 2000 in Canada, the expanded 101-0XXX+ format was mandatory for calling the previous 10-XXX+ codes. And since 2001, in addition to 101-0XXX and the "new" 101-5XXX and 101-6XXX codes, there have been codes from the entire "generic" range of 101-XXXX. However, it might be a long time before the four-digit -xxxx format would run out. I don't know if the plans are to really expand to 10-xxxxx, i.e., '1', '0', and then five posssible 'x' digits, i.e., where the third digit in the full dial-around code could be digits other than just '1'.