Qwest Corporation, doing business as CenturyLink QC, is a Regional Bell Operating Company owned by Lumen Technologies.

When the franchise was secured, wires were strung, boys were hired as operators, a switchboard was installed and the Denver Telephone Dispatch Company opened for business on February 24, 1879.

Denver's Rocky Mountain News reported that "The Telephone Company are adding new subscribers to the system every day.

The Edison Company, with its powerful transmitter, was able to offer service to the nearby towns of Golden, Georgetown, Central City, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo.

The competitive battle raged as the Dispatch Company acquired better transmitters and added Golden, Black Hawk, Georgetown and Central City to their calling area.

In January 1881, Vaille joined a group of Denver business leaders to form the Colorado Telephone Company.

Denver Dispatch faded into history when Vaille sold his remaining two Bell contracts to the Colorado Telephone Company.

Rocky Mountain Bell immediately began an aggressive campaign to buy nearly every small telephone company in the region, and their operating territory soon covered nearly all of Utah, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

A combination of overspending, careless management, and the logistical difficulties of covering an extremely large, sparsely populated territory would eventually put Rocky Mountain Bell in financial trouble.

A number of Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph buildings survive and are listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

The company provided telephone services in Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Southern Idaho, Wyoming, and the El Paso, Texas, vicinity.

They were the first US telco to upgrade their PSTN to electronic switching before 1990 and they were the first to offer residential and business ISDN and later, DSL services to their customers by 1997.

[10] In 1999, US West announced plans to sell 530,000 access lines in largely rural areas to the independent company Citizens Communications for $1.65 billion.

[12] In 2001, Qwest, which acquired US West in 2000, terminated the sale of rural telephone lines agreed upon in 1999 because Citizens refused to complete the transaction.