Unicel

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

~ the last words ~

Rural Cellular Corporation was assembled in 1990 by Rick Ekstrand out of forty small telephone companies that between them held five cellular licenses. The territory was north and west of St. Cloud, Minnesota, and the head office was in Alexandria, a town of about eleven thousand people. This is not how carriers usually start. It is how a farm cooperative starts, and the resemblance was not accidental, because the shareholders were the local phone companies that had been serving those counties since the wire era.

The licenses were the ones nobody bigger had bid seriously for. Cellular spectrum in the United States was awarded market by market, and the markets with few people in them went cheap because the arithmetic on building towers there is bad. Rural Cellular's entire proposition was that the arithmetic is only bad if you are also carrying the overhead of a national company.

It went public on NASDAQ in February 1996 and then spent a decade buying whatever adjacent operator would sell. By 2007 the Unicel brand covered fifteen states, from northern Minnesota out to eastern Washington and Oregon and across to Maine and Vermont, with a separate cluster in Alabama and Mississippi. About 716,000 people were paying it every month, and the licenses reached 4.7 million.

Turkey never had a carrier layer like this at all, and the reason is a licensing decision rather than geography. Turkish GSM licenses were national from the beginning, so the operator you had in Ankara was the operator you had in a village in Anatolia, and there have never been more than four of them at once. There was no company here whose reason for existing was the part of the map the big networks would not pay to cover, because coverage obligations were written into the license instead. Reading about Unicel is reading about a market that was shaped in a room I do not have an equivalent for.

~ the record ~

~ how it was built ~

The network was a patchwork and it showed. Unicel ran on 850 MHz in some places and 1900 MHz PCS in others. Most of the footprint was GSM, but the Minnesota territory it had started from ran cdmaOne, because that is what the operator it came from had built. Older AMPS and D-AMPS handsets stayed in service years after the cities had forgotten what those letters meant.

That is what growth by acquisition produces when nobody stops to rebuild. It also explains the appeal to a buyer. Verizon was not purchasing a network so much as a set of licenses over land it did not hold, plus a customer list already used to paying for service in places where there was only one option.

~ the day it died ~

Verizon announced the agreement on 30 July 2007. Shareholders approved it on 4 October. The deal closed on 7 August 2008, at 2.66 billion dollars in cash and assumed debt for 625,000 customers, and Verizon was in the middle of swallowing Alltel at the same time. That second deal is what complicated this one, because the two footprints overlapped and antitrust review forced divestitures in six markets, all of Vermont among them.

So the ending came in pieces. AT&T took the divested operations in December 2008. On 25 January 2009 Verizon formally took over everything else, and through the first half of that year the Unicel customers were migrated onto Verizon's network and Verizon's billing, and the GSM equipment was left running for a while purely so other carriers' subscribers could roam on it. The signs came down market by market as the conversion reached each one.

~ what it became ~

The name kept walking for a couple of years in the places that had been sold off, attached to networks under new ownership, and unicel.com was still resolving into 2011 before it went dark. Nothing about that stretch was a business. It was a brand being used up before it was thrown away.

What actually ended in 2009 was a structure, not a logo. Forty independent telephone companies had pooled licenses to build something none of them could afford alone. They took it public and then sold it to the largest carrier in the country. The towers are still there and most of them still work. The part that died is the idea that the people in a county could own the network covering it.

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