In addition, telephone users staged a strike, removing their receivers at noon on November 20, 1886, and leaving them off the hook for 18 months while the company stood fast.
The upstart company drummed up about 1500 subscribers for its services and presented a petition to the Rochester City Council for a franchise, which was approved in April 1899.
In addition, Rochester Telephone widened its area of service to include the towns of Charlotte, Fairport, and Pittsford outside city limits.
Although customers professed higher satisfaction with the service of the independent Rochester Telephone Company than they had with the Bell system, they were unable to make long-distance calls.
This, coupled with the high costs of competition with the Bell network, prevented the company from raising any new investment capital for the next four years, and it continued to limp along throughout the 1910s.
Two years later it was agreed that a new corporation, independent of the Bell organization, would be created to buy and operate the telephone systems of both companies.
The newly constituted company, which had been given the name Rochester Telephone Corporation, had 1,200 employees and assets worth about $6 million.
During the ensuing decade, Rochester Telephone grew dramatically, as the nation's economy boomed in the aftermath of World War I.
Two years later, after a long controversy, Rochester Telephone won the right to bill its business customers by call, rather than on a flat rate.
In 1928, the company recorded its largest jump ever in the number of telephones on line and passed the $1 million mark in revenues.
Strapped for cash in the midst of the Great Depression, many of the company's customers gave up their phone service, and cancellations exceeded new orders for several years in the early part of the decade.
As revenues and earnings fell, Rochester Telephone began to cut its work force in an effort to keep costs down.
The company's darkest hour had passed by 1934, however, and its count of telephones in service and revenues began to creep upward that year.
Demand for telephone services continued to grow astronomically in the postwar years, and the company found itself unable to keep up with its customers' needs.
Rochester Telephone struggled to raise capital to provide for expansion and conversion to more efficient dial switching, and in the meantime, urged its customers not to make nonessential calls.
Rochester citizens, relatively tolerant of the company's weaknesses during the war, responded in the postwar period with frustration and criticism.
Open house events at its manual switching centers in 1949 helped to appease the public somewhat, but soon, tempers rose again, as consumers complained about the company's slow and unreliable service.
In the 1950s Rochester Telephone made a number of stock offerings to pay for its long overdue capital improvements.
In 1958, when Rochester Telephone petitioned the state public utilities commission for yet another rate increase, the anger of some of its customers again spilled over onto the editorial pages of newspapers.
The company's preoccupation with the all-important and enormously expensive dial conversion effort had resulted in serious lapses in service in other areas.
Throughout the rest of the 1960s, the company expanded its infrastructure of cables and switching equipment while adding new lines to keep pace with Rochester's growth.
Around this time, the telephone industry was rocked by a Supreme Court ruling that allowed customers to attach their own phone equipment to company lines.
The next year, the business systems unit opened an office in Honolulu to serve hotels there and set up a long-distance service from Hawaii to the continental U.S. known as Call America.
One year later, the company added Rotelcom Data, Inc., and a Supply and Set Refurbishment Division, which fixed up used telephones for resale.
This geographical expansion was designed to offset the effect of a gradual but unmistakable economic retrenchment in the company's home area, Rochester.
Customers located in the Perinton area with a telephone number beginning with "223" or "425" had the chance to participate in a trial of this service and other CLASS calling features which were making their debut in New York at that time.
[6] On September 5, 2024, Verizon announced its intent to acquire Frontier for $20 billion, in a move to expand its fiber internet services.