Frontier (company)

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Frontier is a telephone company that provides service serving rural communities in 30 states of the United States. Currently, they are owned by Citizens Communications, and are not connected to a Regional Bell Operating Company or AT&T. They were formerly known as Rochester Telephone Company, and often telephone equipment in the Rochester, New York area still bears that name. RTC was also the owner and operator of many smaller non-Bell phone companies throughout the state of New York, including Walden Telephone Company, Highland Telephone Company and the AuSable Telephone Company. RTC owned and operated other telephone subsidiaries in states outside of New York. The largest was located in the suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota area.

RTC was also nicknamed "Rochester Tel." The company also used a marketing tag line during this time, "Rochester Tel and You -- The Perfect Connection". This reflected the company's commitment to marketing through a partnership with the local community. The company was one of the first in the nation to offer a caller ID service to its customers. A trial of this service in the early 1990s was one of the first in the United States. Customers located in the Perinton area with a telephone number beginning with "223" or "425" had the chance to participate in a trial of this service and other CLASS calling features which were making their debut in New York at that time.

Through the 1990s, RTC built an extensive nationwide fiber optic long-distance network, making themselves an attractive prospect. In late 1995, RTC changed their name to Frontier Communications, most likely a move to drop any regional affiliations and sound more like a national network. A heated bidding war ensued throughout 1999 as Western United States long distance giant Qwest and Bermuda-based Global Crossing competed to acquire Frontier for its fiber optic network. Neither company was interested in Frontier's local landline business. Global Crossing won the bidding war, but sold off the local landline business to Citzens when Global Crossing was going through bankruptcy. The Frontier name remains today.

Recently, Frontier has begun providing digital subscriber line Internet access, to compete with Time Warner Cable's Road Runner broadband. Frontier also provides voicemail and other business services. They have a calling card service, which can be accessed at 800-TEN-CARD.

More recently, Citizens Communications, parent company of Frontier, announced 14 call centers across the country will be consolidated to two to three call centers. A new call center has been constructed in Deland, Florida. It is still unknown whether the call center in the town of Henrietta, New York, a suburb of Rochester, will close.

Frontier has released several new products to ensure they remain competitve with other telephone data and television service providers. Specifically, they have released a Digital Phone package in most of their exchanges. They also had a business agreement with Dell to provide new desktop systems to customers who signed up for various product offerings. They continue to have an arrangement with DISH Networks to offer satellite television products in combination with High Speed Internet service packages for a reduced rate.