Concord Telephone Company, What Does A/B Carrier Mean?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. I'm not aware that the FCC ever reserved the wireline licenses for the local wireline carrier of record; in fact I can name three cities right off where a different LEC's cellular subsidiary got the license. (Indianapolis, in Ameritech territory, has GTE; Cincinnati, served by Cincinnati Bell, has Ameritech cellular service; and Lexington, a GTE city, has BellSouth Mobility cellular service, with GTE now owning the *other* cellular carrier there!)

A. When cellular licenses were first granted, they were given to two companies in each area. The "B" license was given to the local telephone company and the "A" license was put up first for comparative hearings, and then lotteries. Since there are only two cellular licenses in any one geographical area, there can only be one "A" carrier and one "B" carrier. Now, PAT you know that's not (or was not in the time frame being discussed) strictly true, by far the largest non-wireline 'A' side carrier used to be McCaw Cellular, which had no non-cellular phone interests (it was a cable-TV company and not a big one at that). It's also true that the bulk of the "Cellular ONE" network consisted of markets wholly or partially owned by McCaw. Of course with the sale of McCaw to AT&T a couple of years ago this has changed but to infer that the bulk of A-side carriers were owned by out-of-area landline telephone companies is overstating things just a bit. There was quite a lot of horse trading after the original round of license awards. In many cases carriers swapped licenses around to get larger contiguous areas that'd be easier to serve. Also, the boundaries of the cellular RSAs and MSAs are along county lines which need bear no relationship to exchange boundaries, so there were often multiple LECs in a particular cellular area, in which case there'd be a lottery among the LECs. In my area, for example (Ithaca NY) most of the territory is served by NYNEX, with a couple of small independents such as Empire Telephone and the Trumansburg Home Telephone Company. There was a cellular lottery and Trumansburg won. Then (after a long and not particularly relevant challenge from a local Indian tribe who claimed preference for the license) Trumansburg made a deal with NYNEX who in turn made a deal with Frontier, who actually built and operates the system. This makes sense because the territory is adjacent to other Frontier territories in the Rochester area.

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