Rochester Telephone

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Rochester Telephone Company (not to be confused with RTC of Rochester, Indiana) was for most of the 20th century, the sole phone company servicing Rochester and surrounding counties in upstate New York. Its initial development benefited from the vision of Albrecht Vogt, an early founder of and investor in several Rochester industries, and yielded a successful company that remained independent from AT&T (“Ma Bell”) up to and through the national monopoly’s divestiture in 1984. As a smaller organization with a high-tech city at its core (headquarters of Eastman Kodak and Xerox) RT often led the conservative and intransigent AT&T when it came to features and customer service, delivering, for instance, Touch Tone and Caller ID services well before neighborhoods serviced by Bell’s regional divisions, like New York Telephone.

In 1995, Rochester Tel renamed itself Frontier in order to sound less “local” in the newly competitive landscape. Its investment in fiber long lines proved attractive in the exploding global communications market during the “Internet bubble” and it was acquired in 1999 by Global Crossing, a Bermuda-based communications network enterprise. It sold off Frontier’s local business, keeping the fiber for its world conquest plans until succumbing to market realities: a glut of capacity due to hyped expectations. Global Crossing filed for Chapter 11 protection at the beginning of 2002, with its assets being sold to China Netcom's subsidiary Asia Netcom.

Meanwhile, Frontier remains a unit of Citizens Communications, which offers communications services to rural areas, towns and small cities around the country.