Southern New England Telephone Company history

Western Union conceded the telephone business to Bell in 1879, and Bell, in turn, promised to stay out of the telegraph market.

By 1880, with the money provided by its investor, the New Haven telephone company had acquired the right to provide and interconnect telephone service in all of Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

The company was reorganized yet again as the Southern New England Telephone Company in 1882.

The company gained relief in 1899, when the Connecticut state legislature, recognizing the essentially monopolistic nature of the telephone business, passed a law erecting barriers to the entrance of new companies.

In 1911 the Connecticut law discouraging the creation of new phone companies was replaced by a Public Utilities Commission, which had the power to regulate rates and services for SNET and other utilities companies.

Even more limiting, telephone service was restricted as the federal government, in 1918, assumed control of all telephone and telegraph companies until a peace treaty was signed to bring the war to an end.

In 1938 SNET suffered a major setback when Connecticut was struck by a hurricane which wiped out nearly one third of the region’s phones.

By 1945 SNET had half a million phones in its network; 11 years later that number had doubled.

By 1953 SNET had completed conversion to dial service; newly installed equipment in the small town of Cornwall, Connecticut, became the first large Bell system to make the switch completely.

By 1970 SNET had put 2 million phones on line.

In the agreement that AT&T reached with the government in January of 1982, the company was ordered to spin off its local phone companies to share-holders.

The company announced a partnership with railroad holding company CSX in August of 1983, to build a network of fiber optic communications cables, called LightNet, in 20 eastern states.

SNET rearranged its corporate structure in 1986, forming a holding company to manage the various divisions and changing its overall name to Southern New England Telecommunications, for the purpose of better reflecting the diversified nature of its activities.

In 1989 the company withdrew from the fiber optic network, selling its share in LightNet to Williams Communications for $365 million.

SNET was purchased for $4.4 billion in 1998 by SBC Communications, which subsequently purchased the old AT&T, taking its name as the "new" AT&T. Under AT&T, SNET was known as AT&T Connecticut.

On June 1, 2007, the operations of Woodbury Telephone were merged into SNET.

On October 24, 2014, Frontier Communications completed its purchase of AT&T's Connecticut operations, including Southern New England Telephone and SNET America, for $2 billion. It is the second former unit of the Bell System to be acquired by Frontier, the first being Frontier West Virginia (originally C&P Telephone of West Virginia) which was purchased from Verizon in 2010.