NYNEX

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

~ the obituary ~

NYNEX was one of the seven companies that fell out of the AT&T breakup on 1 January 1984, and it got the piece of the map with the most people standing on it. New York Telephone and New England Telephone were folded together under the new name, which covered most of New York State and five New England states. Delbert C. Staley, who had been running New York Telephone, was named chairman before the company officially opened for business.

A regional phone monopoly in 1984 was a strange animal: it had a guaranteed income and no idea what to do with it. NYNEX spent the 1980s shopping. In April 1986 it bought all 84 IBM Product Centers, added its own 19 Datago stores, and reopened the lot as NYNEX Business Centers, so for a few years the phone company was also a computer shop chain. In June 1988 it bought AGS Computers and ran it as a separate software business. It bought office buildings in Westchester County and in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, with the idea of renting the spare floors out.

None of it worked well enough to keep. By 1993 the company had decided it did not want to be in information services at all and sold AGS to Keane that November, along with its London-based BIS Group. In 1994 it promised to cut 16,800 jobs, 22 percent of its payroll, by the end of 1996, on top of the 13,000 positions it had already let drain away over four years. Ivan Seidenberg became president that February and chairman and chief executive in November.

The ending was a merger rather than a collapse. Bell Atlantic and NYNEX closed what both of them called a merger of equals on 14 August 1997, worth $25.6 billion, with NYNEX holders getting 0.768 of a Bell Atlantic share for each share they owned. Seidenberg got the combined company a year later. Bell Atlantic went on to swallow GTE and renamed the result Verizon, which is the name on the van today. NYNEX died a year before I had an internet connection at all, in a country whose phone company had no competitors to be separated from, so the only thing I ever held of it is the word itself.

~ the case file ~

~ what the name meant ~

It was an acronym for New York New England Exchange, which nobody outside the industry ever worked out, and the logo did not help: six hard black capitals with the X built out of two triangles. It reads today like the name of a chip maker or a 1980s synthesizer company. That was more or less the point. The seven regional companies were all casting around for names that did not sound like the government utility they had just stopped being.

~ one hundred days ~

In August 1989 around 200,000 telephone workers across 20 states walked out on NYNEX, Pacific Telesis, Bell Atlantic and Ameritech at once. Most of those disputes got settled. NYNEX did not agree to a contract until November, which made its strike about a hundred days long. Installations ran months behind and workers were accused of vandalism. A picketer died during it.

The following February the FCC ordered NYNEX to pay $1.4 million in fines and refund $35 million to customers. The scheme was mundane and expensive: a subsidiary called NYNEX Material Enterprises had been overcharging the regulated phone companies for ordinary supplies, moving profit out of the part of the business that regulators capped and into the part they did not, and handing inflated contracts to vendors who turned up at company parties. Two executives had been dismissed over it in the summer of 1988.

~ the arena in Manchester ~

The strangest surviving trace of NYNEX is not in New York. In the early 1990s the company went looking for growth abroad and ended up with operations in Belgium, Gibraltar, the Philippines and Britain, where NYNEX CableComms laid cable television and telephone lines out of offices in Waterlooville, Baguley, Shoreham-by-Sea, Leatherhead and Antrim. In March 1993 it bought Pactel Cable U.K. off Pacific Telesis. It floated the British business in June 1995. And it bought the naming rights to the big new concert hall in Manchester, which spent its first years as the NYNEX Arena.

That cable network had a long afterlife. In 1996 the NYNEX British assets were merged with Mercury Communications, Videotron and Bell Cablemedia, and the combination was renamed Cable & Wireless Communications. NTL bought the cable half in 1999 and completed it in 2000, merged with Telewest in 2006, and rebranded on 8 February 2007 as Virgin Media. A length of coax in Manchester, laid by a New York phone company that no longer exists, is still carrying somebody's television.

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