Alltel

» see alltel.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Alltel never sold a line outside the united states, and it barely sold in the parts of it that get filmed. Its map ran outward from arkansas, small cities and the counties the national carriers had run the numbers on and passed over. In turkey the whole mobile market was three operators and everybody could name all three, so a carrier thirteen million people paid every month while most of the country had never heard of it is a shape that does not exist here.

The company is a good deal older than mobile phones. Allied Telephone Company started in Little Rock in 1943, putting up poles and stringing cable. On 25 october 1983 it merged with Mid-Continent Telephone of Hudson, Ohio, and the result was named Alltel: one point three five billion dollars in assets, fifth largest telephone company in america, formed in the same year the AT&T breakup was rearranging everything around it.

Wireless was the second act and it worked because of where the wires already were. Alltel picked up rural and small market licenses that the national carriers had written off as unprofitable, and by the middle of the 2000s it covered more american land than anyone else. Thirteen million subscribers across thirty four states. Not the biggest by customers, not close to it, but the one that had signal in the places where the other maps went blank.

~ the record ~

~ my circle ~

On 20 april 2006 Alltel launched My Circle. You picked a set of phone numbers, anywhere from one to twenty depending on what you paid, and calls to and from those numbers were free. Any carrier counted. Landlines counted. Nobody else in america would do it, because everybody else was selling in-network minutes as the reason to drag your friends onto the same operator, and My Circle was the opposite bet on the same behavior.

The advertising did the rest of the work. Campbell-Ewald built a campaign around an Alltel salesman named Chad, played by Chad Brokaw, standing in a parking lot next to actors playing the salesmen from the four national carriers and needling them while Come and Get Your Love played underneath. It ran from 2005 until the company stopped existing, and for a lot of americans it is the only surviving memory of Alltel at all.

~ how it actually ended ~

The financial ending came before the operational one. On 20 may 2007 TPG Capital and GS Capital Partners agreed to take the company private at seventy one dollars fifty a share, twenty seven and a half billion dollars, about a ten percent premium on the previous friday's close. Thirteen months later, on 5 june 2008, Verizon Wireless announced it was buying the whole thing for twenty eight point one billion.

It closed on 9 january 2009. Verizon took on twelve point nine million customers and went past eighty three million, becoming the largest carrier in the country. The FCC made it divest a hundred and five markets on the way through. Rebranding of the markets Verizon kept ran through the middle of that year, and the signs came down.

~ what came after ~

The divested piece had a long and fairly pointless afterlife. Atlantic Tele-Network bought twenty six of those markets on 26 april 2010 and ran them as Allied Wireless, still under the Alltel name, so there were people paying an Alltel bill to a company with no connection to Alltel. AT&T bought that operation on 20 september 2013 for seven hundred and eighty million dollars, finished moving the customers across in february 2015, and shut the brand off in early 2016.

What went into the ground with it was the argument. Alltel's whole case had been that coverage is not the same thing as coverage in cities, and that a carrier can make money in places the models say it cannot. Verizon bought the coverage. After that there was nobody left with a network who needed to make the argument.

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