Cincinnati Bell

Cincinnati Bell, Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	: CBB S&P 600 Component
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	1873
Headquarters	Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Area served	Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio
Key people	Ted Torbeck, President & CEO
Products	Local Telephone Service, IPTV
Revenue	$1.462 billion (2011)
Net income	$18.6 million (2011)
Number of employees	2,900 (2005)
Subsidiaries	Cincinnati Bell Telephone Cincinnati Bell Technology Solutions
Website	www.cincinnatibell.com

Cincinnati Bell (stylized in branding materials as Cıncınnatı Bell) is the dominant telephone company for Cincinnati, Ohio, and its nearby suburbs in the U.S. states of Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky. The parent company is named Cincinnati Bell Inc. Its incumbent local exchange carrier subsidiary uses the name Cincinnati Bell Telephone Company LLC. Other subsidiaries handle services such as payphones and long distance calling. Since the 2000s, Cincinnati Bell has diversified into other utilities, such as IPTV and household electricity, while divesting its mobile phone subsidiary. Cincinnati Bell holds the naming rights to Cincinnati's streetcar system, the Cincinnati Bell Connector.

Cincinnati Bell started out as the City and Suburban Telegraph Association and was providing telegraph lines between homes and businesses in 1873, three years before the invention of the telephone. In 1878, it gained exclusive rights to the Bell franchise within a 25-mile (40-km) radius of Cincinnati--the first telephone exchange in Ohio. It has substantially the same incumbent local exchange carrier territory today, straddling 2,400 square miles in three states. The name changed to Cincinnati and Suburban Bell Telephone Company in 1903. It was shortened to Cincinnati Bell in 1971.

Cincinnati Bell and Southern New England Telephone (SNET) were the only two companies in the old Bell System that operated independently because AT&T only owned minority stakes in the companies. Therefore, neither is considered a Regional Bell Operating Company (RBOC), AT&T was not obligated to dispose of their ownership stakes in the companies, and restrictions placed on the Baby Bells did not apply to these two companies. AT&T owned 32.6% of Cincinnati Bell until 1984, at which point the shares AT&T owned were placed into a trust and then sold. In 1998, SNET was bought by SBC Communications, an RBOC, and in 2014 was sold to Frontier Communications, a company with no relation to the former Bell System; however, Cincinnati Bell has remained independent.