AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation (and before that American Information Technologies Corporation), is an American

telecommunication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...

s company that arose out of the 1984

AT&T divestiture The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided loc ...

. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies that was created following the breakup of the

Bell System The Bell System was a system of telecommunication companies, led by the Bell Telephone Company and later by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), that dominated the telephone services industry in North America for over one hundr ...

. Ameritech was acquired in 1999 by SBC Communications, which subsequently acquired

AT&T Corporation AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...

in 2006, becoming the present-day

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

Overview

Ameritech was created as a

holding company A holding company is a company whose primary business is holding a controlling interest in the securities of other companies. A holding company usually does not produce goods or services itself. Its purpose is to own shares of other companies ...

that owned five former

companies in the Midwest. Under its umbrella were: * Illinois Bell Telephone Company *

Indiana Bell Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th sta ...

Telephone Company, Inc. * Michigan Bell Telephone Company * Ohio Bell Telephone Company * Wisconsin Bell, Inc. 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. It added " d/b/a Ameritech (state)" to the names of its Bells to communicate brand unity. Ameritech also owned

Ameritech Cellular Ameritech Mobile Communications, LLC was the first company in the United States to provide cellular mobile phone service to the general public. Cell service became publicly available in Chicago on October 13, 1983. The company was a division of ...

, a wireless company that operated cellular networks in many of the major cities of these states. Ameritech Cellular was previously called Ameritech Mobile Communications. Ameritech also provided

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

service in select areas as part of the

Americast Americast (stylized americast) was a cable alternative broadcast joint venture of five telephone companies: SBC, BellSouth Corporation, Ameritech Corporation, GTE Corporation (later part of Verizon by 2000) and SNET. The Walt Disney Company's ...

venture with other phone companies during the 1990s. Ameritech Advanced Data Services (AADS) Network Access Point (NAP) was one of the original four National Science Foundation exchange points in the United States starting in 1994. AADS was a Tier 1 network Internet Exchange Point in Chicago, Illinois that provided service to higher education and research networks via a program called Star TAP and commercial networks. After the merger with SBC, AADS did business as the SBC Network Access Point or SBC/AADS NAP. Ameritech 1984 logo

Prior to its merger with

SBC Communications The history of AT&T dates back to the invention of the telephone. The Bell Telephone Company was established in 1877 by Alexander Graham Bell, who obtained the first US patent for the telephone, and his father-in-law, Gardiner Greene Hubbard. Bell ...

, Ameritech's corporate headquarters were in a leased space above the

Chicago Mercantile Exchange The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) (often called "the Chicago Merc", or "the Merc") is a global derivatives marketplace based in Chicago and located at 20 S. Wacker Drive. The CME was founded in 1898 as the Chicago Butter and Egg Board, an ...

on floors 34 through 39 of 30 S Wacker Dr,

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

. Further corporate offices were located at 225 W Randolph St, Chicago (formerly "The Illinois Bell Building") and 2000 W. Ameritech Center Drive,

Hoffman Estates Hoffman Estates is a village in Illinois, United States. The village is located primarily in Cook County, with a small section in Kane County. It is a suburb of Chicago. Per the 2020 census, the population was 52,530. The village now serves ...

) ("The Ameritech Center"). It was traded on the

NYSE The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its liste ...

under the "AIT" symbol.

Merger with SBC Communications

In May 1998, Ameritech announced its intent to merge with

. 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 to ensure adequate 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

assets in Chicago 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 in the same market, would have wielded too much market power. SBC and Ameritech officially merged on October 8, 1999. Prior to the merger, Ameritech's Chairman and CEO was Richard Notebaert, who later (in 2002) became CEO of competitor Qwest.

The end of the Ameritech name

On January 15, 2003, SBC Communications changed its d.b.a. names, changed the legal name of Ameritech Corp. to SBC Teleholdings, Inc., which began doing business as SBC Midwest. On January 15, 2006, d.b.a names were again changed to align with SBC's assumption of the AT&T brand identity following its acquisition of AT&T Corp. the previous year, and Ameritech was again renamed, becoming AT&T Teleholdings, Inc. and began doing business as AT&T Midwest. Several Ameritech subsidiaries remain legally named "Ameritech", such as Ameritech Advanced Services; however, they do business as "AT&T Advanced Solutions". In 2006, the holding companies

Pacific Telesis Pacific Telesis Group was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies, sometimes also referred to as "RBOCs" or "Baby Bells", created in 1983 in preparation of the breakup of AT&T as a holding company for Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, Pa ...

and Southern New England Telecommunications were legally merged into AT&T Teleholdings. The company then became a holding company for Pacific Bell (and its subsidiary Nevada Bell) and Southern New England Telephone.

In popular culture

The Ameritech name was used in the storyline of the U.S. television miniseries '' Amerika'' to refer to one of the "sovereign" autonomous regions—Ameritech's regional operating area, the

Great Lakes The Great Lakes, also called the Great Lakes of North America, are a series of large interconnected freshwater lakes in the mid-east region of North America that connect to the Atlantic Ocean via the Saint Lawrence River. There are five lakes ...

area of

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and th ...

—that the former

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

was divided into in result of the fictional

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

occupation that is the base premise of the miniseries' plot.

References

External links