What Happened to the Bell System after Divestiture?

By Clyde Just

In the first issue of our newsletter this year you read an article by Cindy Hadsell concerning the happenings of the first few days of the break-up of the Bell System. In this article I am going to try to briefly explain some key events that occurred from 1984 to 2000.

Prior to 1/1/84 the Bell System consisted of 21 operating companies, Bell Labs, Western Electric and the corporate offices of AT&T. The next day there were eight companies. The new AT&T was just a shadow of itself. It retained Interlata Long distance, Bell Labs, and Western Electric. The 21 operating companies divided the 48 states into seven separate companies. The names were NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, Ameritech, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, U S West, and Pacific Telesis. These seven companies were often referred to as the “Baby Bells”.

For the next 10 years or so there were some changes but nothing major until 1995. It was at this time that a whirlwind of action began amongst the Baby Bells. Over the next few paragraphs I will try to cover some of the key changes that were made.

Southwestern Bell started the ball rolling in 1995 by changing its name to SBC.  Then in 1995 SBC merged with Pacific Telesis and Pac Tel was no more.

In 2005 SBC acquired AT&T and elected to change their name from SBC to AT&T. Finally, in 2006 the new AT&T acquired Bell South.

The end result was that one of the seven Baby Bells acquired three other Baby Bells as well as AT&T.

Other major changes occurred in 1996 when Bell Atlantic agreed to a merger with NYNEX and the new company kept the Bell Atlantic name.

In 2000 Bell Atlantic merged with GTE and changed its name to Verizon.

While all of the above was happening, prior to AT&T being acquired by SBC, AT&T had spun off most of the Bell Labs and its equipment manufacturing into Lucent Technologies. The remaining Bell Labs researchers formed AT&T Laboratories.

In 2000 Lucent spun off Avaya and in 2006 Lucent merged with Alcatel, a French communications company to form Alcatel-Lucent. In 2016 Alcatel-Lucent was acquired by Nokia, a Finnish Telecommunications Company.

This now leaves us with U S West. Up to 2000 USW basically stayed the same. Qwest merged with U S West on June 30, 200 through an apparent hostile take-over. Then on April 1, 2011 CenturyLink and Qwest merged under the name CenturyLink.

The last change in this saga occurred on September 14, 2020 when CenturyLink changed its name to Lumen. On September 18, 2020 the stock ticker changed from CTL to LUMN.

While I was doing the necessary research that describes the above happening I also discovered that there were many other transactions of acquisitions, spin-offs, etc. amongst many of the above named companies. In the interest of the length of this article I elected to not describe all of these activities. If you are interested you are most welcome to visit the Internet and ask any questions you have and you will be amazed at what has happened over the past thirty years.

In closing, it is ironic that none of the names of the seven Baby Bells survived past 2000. The only name that survived was AT&T but the current AT&T looks totally different than the AT&T of 1/1/84 or the AT&T of pre-1984.

Stock Certificates…note how the image in the USW stock certificate differs from the others.