Island Telephone Company

» see islandtel.pe.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Telephones reached Prince Edward Island on 20 December 1884, when Robert Angus put the first Charlottetown exchange into trial operation. A Telephone Company of Prince Edward Island was incorporated the following year. Maritime Telegraph and Telephone took a controlling interest on 1 December 1911, three months after a fire destroyed the Charlottetown switchboard, and ownership passed again in 1922. The company that this grave is actually about was created later, on 29 April 1929, when the provincial legislature passed an act incorporating The Island Telephone Company Limited.

Through most of its history it was far from the only telephone company on the island. At the end of 1929 Island Telephone had 4,072 telephones in service and fifty-six separate rural companies served another 1,394 customers between them. By 1932 there were forty-five privately owned telephone companies on an island with a population you could fit into a mid-sized town. The history of Island Tel is mostly the history of buying them, one at a time, until the last rural company was absorbed in 1974.

The modernization ran late and in an odd order. Summerside got dial service on 9 February 1950, on a British Strowger step-by-step switch, three years before the capital did: Charlottetown's dial office opened officially on 30 June 1953. Direct distance dialing arrived in 1973. Tyne Valley was converted on 30 November 1977, and with it the whole island had dial telephones and all twenty-six exchanges had long distance dialing. The last manual service on Prince Edward Island ended in the same year the Apple II went on sale.

~ the case file ~

~ the numbers at the end ~

Island Tel published its own annual reports until it stopped being a public company, and they are the reason this grave has real figures in it. At the end of 1997 it carried 93,984 network access services and employed 338 people full time, against 84,308 lines and 363 people two years earlier. Revenues were $71.7 million. The company said it had invested more than $250 million over its life to build a network that was entirely digital and gave every customer access to a single party line, which on an island that had run party lines into the 1990s was the thing worth saying.

Ninety-four thousand lines is not a large telephone company by any national measure. It is, however, a very large number of lines for Prince Edward Island, which is the only comparison that tells you whether a utility of this kind did what it existed to do.

~ the four-way ~

On 31 May 1999 four Atlantic Canadian telephone holding companies combined into one. Bruncor in New Brunswick, Island Telecom on PEI, Maritime Telegraph and Telephone in Nova Scotia and NewTel Enterprises in Newfoundland became Aliant Inc., a three billion dollar company with $1.7 billion in revenues and nine thousand employees. Island Tel's own press release recorded that more than 99 percent of voting shareholders had approved it at meetings held on 18 and 19 May, and that its shares, which traded under the ticker IT, would no longer be listed as of the opening of business the next day. Island shareholders received 3,533,469 Aliant shares, which came to 2.8 percent of the merged company.

Two months after the company stopped being a company, it got a new president. On 30 July 1999 Aliant named Philip Acorn president and chief operating officer of Island Telecom, effective when Fred Morash retired on 7 August. Acorn had been with the company thirty years and had started as a technician. The chairman said he was especially pleased the new president had been chosen from within Island Tel. He was being handed a brand with four years left in it.

~ the name on the phone book ~

Aliant kept the four provincial names after the merger, on the sensible theory that people in Charlottetown had been paying Island Tel their whole lives. The retreat was gradual enough to be watched from the outside. In May 2002 a PEI blogger posted an entry titled "Good-bye Island Tel", noting that the new phone books had arrived and were clearly Aliant-branded, with the old Island Tel name shrunk to a tag line. The next year the books came out under Aliant alone.

The website went the same way and can be dated more precisely. On 14 February 2003 islandtel.pe.ca was still serving a page titled "Island Tel an Aliant company". By 5 April it was a 341-byte redirect titled "Aliant - Prince Edward Island", and the last capture of the domain, in June 2006, is a meta refresh pointing at an Aliant products page. Aliant itself became Bell Aliant in 2008 and was wound into Bell Canada in 2015.

One piece of Island Tel is still in force. Its tariff with the federal regulator, number 11001, was never canceled. It was retitled the Prince Edward Island General Tariff, and items under it carry effective dates as recent as this year. The brand went and the legal person went, but the filing number is still doing its job.

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