Rochester Telephone

Rochester Telephone Company (RTC) (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. Some telephone equipment in the Rochester area still bears the company's name. 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.

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.

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.

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 in the late 1990s when RTC was acquired in 1999 by Global Crossing, a Bermuda-based communications network enterprise. Citizens Communications acquired Global's local exchange properties, including the Frontier brand, in 2001. Global Crossing filed for Chapter 11 protection at the beginning of 2002, with its remaining assets being sold to China Netcom's subsidiary Asia Netcom.

Under the Frontier brand, Citizens Communications provides telephone, television and Internet services in 24 states. The company changed its name on July 31, 2008, to Frontier Communications Corporation.

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