Rochester Telephone Corporation

Rochester Telephone Corporation was a company that provided local telephone service to Rochester, New York. The company was founded in 1920 as a merger of Rochester Telephonic Exchange and Rochester Telephone Company. In 1995 the company became Frontier Corporation, trading on the NYSE under the FRO symbol. Ownership passed to Global Crossing in 1999, and then, in 2001, to Citizens Utilities Corporation, which later changed its name to Frontier Communications.

Rochester Telephone Corporation was the thirteenth largest diversified American telecommunications company and the largest telephone company in New York. It provided local telephone service to customers in 14 states and operated subsidiaries in a number of related fields. The company was founded in the fledgling days of the telephone industry as an independent telephone operation, not affiliated with the nationwide Bell network. After suffering the effects of poor management in the middle years of the century, Rochester Telephone recovered and grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s. This strong progress allowed the company to successfully diversify in the 1980s.