Ameritech (American Information Technologies) arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of seven RBOCs, or Regional Bell Operating Companies divested.
Ameritech was created as a holding company; under its umbrella were:
- Illinois Bell Telephone Company
- Indiana Bell Telephone Company, Inc.
- Michigan Bell Telephone Company
- The Ohio Bell Telephone Company
- Wisconsin Telephone Company
For Ameritech's first nine years, it maintained these Bell brands inherited from the Bell System -- though public displays of the Bell companies' names were often captioned "An Ameritech Company". In January 1993, Ameritech officially retired the Bell brands and marketed itself with solely the Ameritech name across all five states in its territory.
Ameritech also owned Ameritech Cellular , a wireless company that operated cellular networks in many of the major cities of these states.
Prior to its merger with SBC Communications, Ameritech's corporate headquarters were in a leased space above the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on floors 34 through 39 of 30 S Wacker Dr, Chicago IL. Further corporate offices were located at 225 W Randolph St, Chicago IL (formerly "The Illinois Bell Building") and 1 Ameritech Center Dr, Hoffman Estates IL ("The Ameritech Center").
Merger With SBC Communications
In May 1998, Ameritech announced its intent to merge with SBC Communications. This brought great concern to Federal and state regulators, who in turn didn't approve the merger until SBC and Ameritech agreed to several conditions [1] to ensure adequete competition. Most notably, regulators required:
- that the merged company offer local phone service in thirty markets outside of its home territory within thirty months of the merger (i.e. by April 2002) or pay a $1.18B penalty
- and that Ameritech Cellular be sold to GTE. Since SBC already had a majority stake in a large mobile provider (Cellular One), the merged company, if it were to operate Ameritech Cellular and Cellular One both, would have wielded too much market power. GTE in turn merged with Bell Atlantic in 2000 to form Verizon, with Verizon's cellular assets being spun off into Verizon Wireless. a joint venture of Verizon and the UK's Vodafone Group.
SBC and Ameritech officially merged on 1999-10-08. Prior to the merger, Ameritech's Chairman and CEO was Richard Notebaert , who later (in 2002) became CEO of competitor Qwest.
Some critics [2] contend that the merged SBC-Ameritech failed to offer competing service by the April 2002 deadline and consequently should pay the $1.18B penalty.
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