Ameritech
former Regional Bell Operating Company that had NYSE ticker symbol AIT
AT&T Teleholdings, Inc., formerly known as Ameritech Corporation (and, before that, American Information Technologies Corporation), was an American telecommunications company that arose out of the 1984 AT&T divestiture. Ameritech was one of the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies created following the breakup of the Bell System. Ameritech was acquired in 1999 by SBC Communications, which subsequently acquired AT&T Corporation in 2006, becoming the present-day AT&T.
Overview
Ameritech was created as a holding company that owned five former Bell System companies in the Midwest. Under its umbrella were:
Illinois Bell Telephone Company
Indiana Bell Telephone Company, Inc.
Michigan Bell Telephone Company
Ohio Bell Telephone Company
Wisconsin Bell, Inc.
For Ameritech's first nine years, it maintained these Bell brands inherited from the Bell System—though public displays of the Bell companies' names were often captioned "An Ameritech Company". In January 1993, Ameritech officially retired the Bell brands and marketed itself with solely the Ameritech name across all five states in its territory. It added "d/b/a Ameritech (state)" to the names of its Bells to communicate brand unity.
Ameritech also owned Ameritech Cellular, a wireless company that operated cellular networks in many of the major cities of these states. Ameritech Cellular was previously called Ameritech Mobile Communications.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Ameritech” as former Regional Bell Operating Company that had NYSE ticker symbol AIT. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as former Regional Bell Operating Company that had NYSE ticker symbol AIT. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4745803. VIAF identifies the subject as 142173725. The Library of Congress control number is no90021267. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1984, 1999, 2006 and 1993.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Ameritech”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Ameritech primary sources, Ameritech archive and Ameritech research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ameritech”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Ameritech” 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.