Centel
Centel Corporation was an American telecommunications company, with primary interests in basic telephone service, cellular phone service and cable television service.
Early history
In 1900, Max McGraw took his savings from his newspaper route to start an electrical repair and supply shop, the McGraw Electric Company, in Sioux City, Iowa. Over the years, McGraw's company grew from residential wiring installation to include industrial wiring, electrical supply wholesaling, and electronics manufacturing. In 1922, McGraw entered the telecommunications business with the purchase of Central Telephone and Electric Company of St. Louis, Missouri. McGraw's businesses grew rapidly, and in 1926 more than 20 separate electric and telephone companies were consolidated as Central West Public Service Company.Through a series of mergers, acquisitions, purchases, sales, and re-purchases, the electrical supply and manufacturing side of the business would form the nucleus of McGraw-Edison. Through similar processes, the telecommunications side would become Centel, which became the name of the company in 1982.
Centel
Centel provided telephone service through its Central Telephone Company subsidiary. Its largest coverage areas by lines installed were Las Vegas, Chicago suburbs, Tallahassee, Florida and Charlottesville, Virginia. It was, until the breakup of AT&T in 1984, the fifth-largest telephone company in the United States after AT&T, GTE, United Telecom and Contel.Centel also owned a stake in Keyfax, a teletext/videotex service operating in the Chicago area, alongside Honeywell and Field Enterprises. The service was discontinued by 1986.÷
Centel sold its cable operations in 1989. Centel sold its electric operations in 1991 to UtiliCorp United.
Centel had consolidated revenues of $1.2 billion in 1991.
Centel was purchased by Sprint in 1993 for approximately $3billion in Sprint common stock. Centel's stock was trading at $42.50 per share on the New York Stock Exchange just before the merger announcement in May 1992, but the cash value of the deal worked out to be only $33.50 per share of Centel stock. After a bitter battle with dissident shareholders who believed the company was worth more, the merger was ultimately approved by a very narrow majority, with 50.5% of the outstanding shares voting for the merger.
At the time of its 1993 purchase by Sprint, Centel provided local telephone service to 1.5million telephone lines in seven states and was also the 10th-largest U.S. cellular company with operations in 22states. It had 9,300employees.
Ultimately, Sprint did not end up keeping either of Centel's businesses that it acquired. The cellular operations were spun off in 1996 so Sprint could instead focus on providing Sprint PCS cellular service. The local telephone operations were spun off in 2006.
Former subsidiaries
Central Telephone Company
In 2006, Sprint spun off the former Centel telephone subsidiaries as part of the formation of Embarq. Embarq was acquired in 2009 by CenturyTel, which was renamed CenturyLink. Central Telephone's Florida operations were merged with Sprint's and are now CenturyLink of Florida, while the Nevada operations are now CenturyLink of Nevada. Other ex-Centel local operations were divested in 2022 to the new company Brightspeed.Earlier, in 1997, Sprint sold the Chicago-area phone operations to Ameritech. Operations in Iowa and Minnesota were sold to Frontier Communications in 1991, and in Ohio to CenturyTel in 1992. The Ohio operations, by this point CenturyTel of Ohio, would reunite with most of the other Centel operating companies in 2009.
Centel Cellular Company
In 1993, Centel Cellular Company changed its name to Sprint Cellular Company when Sprint acquired Centel. It was subsequently spun off as 360 Communications Company in 1996. Alltel acquired 360 Communications Company in 1998 for $4.1billion.Verizon Wireless acquired Alltel in 2008.
Centel Cable Television
In 1989, Centel sold all of its cable television operations in six separate transactions.Southeast Florida operations: to Adelphia Communications, which later sold to Time Warner Cable, which later sold the properties to Comcast.
Ohio operations: to Warner Cable.
Central Florida operations: to American Television and Communications Corporation.
Kentucky operations: to Simmons Communications.
Michigan operations: to C-TEC.
Illinois operations: to Jones Intercable.
The combined revenue of the sales amounted to $1.4billion, which yielded a net gain of over $500million to Centel.