U S West

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

~ the last words ~

U S West sold local telephone service and intraLATA toll calls, later adding data lines, across Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. That is an enormous share of the land area of the United States and a far smaller share of its population, which is the single fact that shaped the whole company. It traded in New York under the ticker USW and it ran out of 1801 California Street in Denver, the tallest building in the city.

It was created in 1983 under the Modification of Final Judgment, the consent decree that broke up the Bell System, and began operating as one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies at divestiture. The annual report that entity filed for 2000 counts approximately 49,000 employees, with about 75 percent of them covered by collective bargaining agreements. That is a utility, not a technology company, and it is worth holding in mind when reading what happened to it.

On 30 June 2000 it merged with and into Qwest Communications International. Over the following year the brand came off the trucks and the buildings, and the SEC registrant that had filed as U S West Communications since March 1994 was formally renamed Qwest Corporation on 11 October 2000. Qwest in turn disappeared into CenturyLink on 1 April 2011, and CenturyLink renamed itself Lumen in 2020.

I came to the Baby Bells the way most engineers outside America do, which is backwards, through the antitrust case rather than through a telephone bill. The breakup of AT&T turns up in competition-policy reading and in network-industry coursework as the worked example, and the seven companies in it arrive as a diagram with regions shaded in. Turkey had one telephone company until the 2000s and nobody here needed a map of which Bell covered Wyoming. The names on that diagram were never products to me, and U S West is the one I still have to look up.

~ the record ~

~ three bells into one ~

The holding company inherited three separate Bell operating companies, each carrying a separate name and a century of history behind it. Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph, generally called Mountain Bell, ran out of Denver, while Northwestern Bell sat in Omaha and Pacific Northwest Bell in Seattle. From 1988 all three started doing business under the U S West Communications name, and on 1 January 1991 the other two were legally merged into Mountain Bell, which was then renamed U S West Communications, Inc.

That made it the first Baby Bell to consolidate its operating companies rather than run them as a federation, with BellSouth the only other one to do it. The old names stayed technically undissolved for years afterward, which is normal for telephone corporate structures and tells you nothing about who was answering the phone.

~ first to market ~

The surprising thing about a sleepy regional monopoly is how much of the modern phone network it shipped first. U S West was the first local telephone company in America to sell Caller ID, in 1991, roughly four years ahead of any other local carrier, and it had finished converting its public switched network to electronic switching before 1990, ahead of every other US telco. Residential and business ISDN followed, then DSL by 1997.

Part of the reason was geography. Its switching equipment was comparatively new, so it needed fewer upgrades to carry a new feature, and its service area was growing fast enough that the subscriber base tripled in a short span. The other part was method: it rolled new calling features out in staggered trials in middle-sized cities like Boise and Phoenix before going wide, which is beta testing, and it was doing it to telephone features before the word had attached itself to software. The ad agency NW Ayer gave it the slogan "Life's better here."

The company was also an early and unusual employer on one front. The Eagles, a resource group for its gay and lesbian employees, was formally recognized in 1989 and had chapters in seven states by 1990. None of that protected it from the complaint that followed it everywhere, which was that orders took too long and the collections department was aggressive. Critics pointed at the margins and the spending on new features and asked why customer service was last in the queue.

~ the split that ran backwards ~

U S West spent the 1990s buying things that were not telephone lines. It took the Atlanta-based Wometco and GTC cable operations in 1994, bought Continental Cablevision after that, put 26 percent into Time Warner Entertainment, and formed a joint venture with Time Warner Cable in 1993 that eventually became TW Telecom. By 1998 the cable and wireless and international assets were worth more to investors separately than attached to a regulated utility, so the company split in two.

The structure of that split is the detail worth stopping on. The telephone business kept the U S West name. Everything else became MediaOne. But MediaOne Inc. was set up as the legal successor to U S West Inc., and the telephone company, the original business, the one with the name on it, was the spin-off entity. The parent walked away as the cable company and left its own founding operation as the offshoot. MediaOne was bought by AT&T and the Time Warner stake ended up at Comcast, which sold it back to Time Warner in 2003.

~ the entity that did not die ~

Qwest was four years into existence in 2000. It had been incorporated in 1996 to pull fiber through a trench beside Philip Anschutz's railroad right of way, it had far fewer customers and far less revenue than U S West, and it had a share price that made the arithmetic work. The deal was valued at around $48 billion. The fiber startup bought the utility, and the full account of what Qwest then did with its books is written up on this site under its own name.

Underneath the branding, though, nothing was destroyed. SEC registrant 68622 filed as Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph, then as U S West Communications from 22 March 1994, then as Qwest Corporation from 11 October 2000, and it is still filing today as a Lumen subsidiary. The copper in fourteen states stayed exactly where it was, and so did the union contracts and the regulatory obligations attached to it. A Baby Bell is nearly impossible to kill, which is why the thing that died here was a word.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »