PrimeCo
American telecommunications company
PrimeCo Personal Communications, L.P. (later known as Chicago 20 MHz, LLC) was a joint venture of Bell Atlantic and AirTouch Communications, and was the first wireless telecommunications provider to turn up CDMA service on the PCS (1900-MHz) band in November 1996. When the company was founded, it had its headquarters in Westlake, Texas. At a later point its headquarters were in Itasca, Illinois.
History
Hailed as the largest wireless phone service launch in U.S. history, the company successfully launched in 19 major U.S. cities. The company's original cell site equipment suppliers were Motorola and AT&T (now Lucent Technologies), and the original telephone supplier was Qualcomm Personal Electronics, a joint venture between Qualcomm and Sony Electronics. The company served parts of the Midwestern and Southern United States. The two primary service areas included Wisconsin, northern and central Illinois, and northern Indiana; and parts of Virginia and North Carolina, as well as the Gulf Coast from Key West, Florida to Houston, Texas. PrimeCo had the license to operate in Hawaii.
PrimeCo won many marketing awards for innovative advertising campaigns. The first "tease" campaign had scenes like a pizza delivery man "beaming" onto a beach a few seconds after the order is placed.
“PrimeCo” enters the record as american telecommunications company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what PrimeCo, American and telecommunications can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“PrimeCo” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, PrimeCo, American and telecommunications provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7243215. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1900 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “PrimeCo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.