Phone companies survive by not calling themselves phone companies

Three decades after the Bell System breakup, phone companies still exist. They just don’t call themselves phone companies.

Bill Virgin | February 2012 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Back in the days of one local telephone company, one type of service and maybe one style of phone, what happened to companies like Pacific Northwest Bell or General Telephone & Electronics was big news.

But when the successors to these legacy landline telephone companies in Washington state were sold in the space of a year recently, the biggest concern on the minds of many was what would be the name of the stadium where the Seattle Seahawks and Sounders FC played.

That such significant news about once significant companies got so little attention is reflective of what’s been happening in what we used to quaintly think of as the telephone business. These days, everyone’s a telephone company, if by “telephone company” you mean connecting the voices of two people not within shouting distance of one another. Mobile phone and device service providers are phone companies. Cable-TV companies that offer voice service over their networks are phone companies. Skype, a recent Microsoft acquisition that uses the internet to connect people, is a phone company.

But as defined by regulation and the idea that conversations are carried over copper wire, those aren’t telephone companies—which is a problem for old-style telcos that are seeing their traditional customer and service base eroded by the alternatives. In 2000, Qwest Communications had a total of 3 million residential and business lines in Washington. Less than a decade later, that number had dropped to 1.3 million lines.

So what are CenturyLink Inc., the Louisiana company that bought Qwest last year, and Frontier Communications, the Connecticut company that acquired Verizon Communications’ local phone business in 2010, doing to make themselves, and the services they offer, relevant?

One thing they’re not doing is calling themselves phone companies.

“Our mission at CenturyLink is to be the premier provider of broadband services,” says Brian Stading, CenturyLink’s executive vice president for Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Frontier, adds Maggie Wilderotter, chair and CEO, is being transformed from a telephone company operating largely in small-town and rural markets to a “communication services company” that offers voice, video and data services.

CenturyLink and Frontier will still sell you landline telephone service if that’s what you want, and for all the talk of no one having a wired telephone anymore there are still plenty of people who not only have one but also prefer it. “My wife will not talk to me cell phone to cell phone if she’s at home,” says Stading.