The Woodbury Telephone Company was a telephone company that served the

Connecticut Connecticut ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York (state), New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. ...

towns of Woodbury, Southbury,

Bethlehem Bethlehem is a city in the West Bank, Palestine, located about south of Jerusalem, and the capital of the Bethlehem Governorate. It had a population of people, as of . The city's economy is strongly linked to Tourism in the State of Palesti ...

, and parts of Roxbury and

Oxford Oxford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, cathedral city and non-metropolitan district in Oxfordshire, England, of which it is the county town. The city is home to the University of Oxford, the List of oldest universities in continuou ...

. In 1997, Woodbury Telephone was acquired by

Southern New England Telecommunications Southern New England Telecommunications Corporation (SNET) started operations in 1986 as the holding company for the Southern New England Telephone Company, the dominant local phone carrier in Connecticut, which had been a minority holding of AT& ...

. In 1998, SNET merged with

SBC Communications AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the ...

and Woodbury Telephone, the 75th largest independent telephone carrier in the United States, continued as a separate operating company under Southern New England Telephone. On June 1, 2007, the company was dissolved and merged all assets and operations into

Southern New England Telephone The Southern New England Telephone Company (SNET), doing business as Frontier Communications of Connecticut, is a local exchange carrier owned by Frontier Communications. History It started operations on January 28, 1878, as the District Teleph ...

History

Woodbury Telephone began operation in the 1870s when a local businessman, Mr. Charles A. Stone visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition 1876 and realized the value of connecting his grain and feed store to the Southbury Railroad Station via the telephone. The company grew modestly and was incorporated in 1910 with Arthur D. Warner as its first President. The company continued in operation and upgraded from a manual switchboard to a direct dial system in 1955. As the service area grew considerably in the 1970s and 1980s the company deployed digital switching, fiber optic network architecture and in the 1990s it successfully introduced internet service with broadband access. At the time of its acquisition by SNET, the company had 19,000 lines.

Other historical notes

*Woodbury Telephone was the only local telephone operating company SBC/AT&T owned that had no roots in the original AT&T or

Alexander Graham Bell Alexander Graham Bell (; born Alexander Bell; March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born Canadian Americans, Canadian-American inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He als ...

. *There were five other independent telephone companies that served parts of Connecticut and were bought by SNET: Lebanon (1912), East Haven (1925), Collinsville (1939), Sharon (1943) and Huntington (1948).

References

{{Reflist Frontier Communications Communications in Connecticut American companies established in 1870 Telecommunications companies disestablished in 2007 2007 mergers and acquisitions Woodbury, Connecticut Defunct companies based in Connecticut Defunct telecommunications companies of the United States