Ever wonder how your telephone company relates to other telecommunication companies? Think that AT&T's monopoly was successfully broken up by the Feds back in the 80s? And do you know what Sprint was originally named after?
Here's a look at the (convoluted) family tree of telephone companies. You'd be surprised at finding out who actually owns whom: Link (large pic)
Included in the 1992 formation of Sprint's local landline telephone division (merger/acquisition with United Telecom) was Central Telephone Company (Centel). For a few years after 1992, the company branded itself as "Sprint Centel" and "Sprint United" in the respective markets.
Centel operated a cellular telephone system in portions of the United States as well, and this became Sprint Cellular. Sprint entered the GSM market in the mid 1990's and spun off the old cellular division. The former Sprint Cellular, along with various other local cellular systems (Cellular One's Richmond, VA market is one example) were rolled into 360 Communications, which was purchased by Alltel in 1999.
Sprint marketed its new GSM service as "Sprint Spectrum" in the Washington, DC area for a few years before selling it to what would become VoiceStream, which as we all know eventually became T-Mobile USA. Sprint wanted to focus on new PCS technologies and built out its Sprint PCS CDMA network (incidentally still licensed as Sprint Spectrum, L.P. on a national level).
Now we see that the former Sprint Local division, now called Embarq, is going to be rolled into another telecom.
It's worth including, I think, given that Western Electric was a *huge* company for a while and even ventured into the personal computer market.
Western Electric gear is quite collectible. As much of their gear was built to be leased, it was built to very high standards to reduce servicing requirements.