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The Southern New England Telephone Company

Trade name	Frontier Communications of Connecticut
Company type	Subsidiary
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	1878; 147 years ago (1878)
Headquarters	New Haven, Connecticut
Key people	Dan McCarthy (chairman and CEO) Ken Arndt (East Region president) Paul Quick (SVP & General Manager, Connecticut) Edward O'Connor Jr. (Sales VP, Connecticut) Joseph Ferraiolo (Area General Manager, New Haven County) Zachary Tomblin (Area General Manager, Eastern Connecticut)
Products	Local Telephone Service, Broadband
Number of employees	2700
Parent	SNET (1986–1998) SBC/AT&T Inc. (1998–2014) Frontier (2014–present; Sale to Verizon pending)
Website	http://www.frontier.com/

The Southern New England Telephone Company (SNET), doing business as Frontier Communications of Connecticut, is a local exchange carrier owned by Frontier Communications.

History

It started operations on January 28, 1878, as the District Telephone Company of New Haven. It was the founder of the first telephone exchange, as well as the world's first telephone book. Since its inception, SNET has held a monopoly on most of the telephone services in the state of Connecticut; the only remaining exceptions are the Greenwich and Byram exchanges where Verizon New York provides telephone service.

SNET and Cincinnati Bell were the only two companies in the old Bell System in which the old AT&T only held a minority stake; by 1983, AT&T's stake was only 19.6 percent. Therefore, both were considered independents rather than Bell Operating Companies.

Sale to SBC

SNET was purchased for $4.4 billion in 1998 by SBC Communications, which subsequently purchased the old AT&T, taking its name as the "new" AT&T. Under AT&T, SNET was known as AT&T Connecticut.

In 2006, AT&T merged the operations of SNET into AT&T Teleholdings, formerly Ameritech, making it a subsidiary of the latter.

On June 1, 2007, the operations of Woodbury Telephone were merged into SNET.

Sale to Frontier

On October 24, 2014, Frontier Communications completed its purchase of AT&T's Connecticut operations, including Southern New England Telephone and SNET America, for $2 billion. The company began doing business as Frontier Communications of Connecticut. It is the second former unit of the Bell System to be acquired by Frontier, the first being Frontier West Virginia (originally C&P Telephone of West Virginia) which was purchased from Verizon in 2010.

Proposed Sale to Verizon

On September 5, 2024, Verizon announced that it will buy Frontier Communications for $20 billion. The acquisition, if approved, will see Verizon taking control of Frontier’s operations, including SNET.

See also

• List of United States telephone companies
• ConnNet

External links

• History – University of Connecticut Libraries
• "AT&T Press Release Headlines & News from AT&T". att.com. Retrieved 2017-08-09.

References

1. First Commercial Telephone Exchange – Today in History: January 28, Connecticut's Office of the State Historian
2. AT&T SNET Fairfield County White Pages, Customer Service Guide page 14, "Local Toll-free Calling Areas", August 2006 edition
3. Pilon, Matt (June 6, 2018). "Frontier's CT losses spike". HartfordBusiness.com. Retrieved January 23, 2019.
4. "Verizon to acquire Frontier". www.verizon.com. 2024-09-05. Retrieved 2024-09-05.

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