SPRINT

GTE Sprint
Southern Pacific Communications Company (SPC), a unit of the Southern Pacific Railroad, began providing long-distance telephone service after the Execunet II decision late in 1978. SPC was headquartered in Burlingame, California (where Sprint still maintains a technology lab, on Adrian Ct.)

The Railroad had an extensive microwave communications system along its rights of way used for internal communications; later (after the Execunet II decision) they expanded by laying fiber optic cables along the same rights of way. In 1972, they began selling surplus capacity on that system to corporations for use as Private Lines, thereby circumventing AT&T's then-monopoly on public telephony. Prior attempts at offering long distance voice services had not been approved by the Federal Communications Commission, although a fax service (called SpeedFAX) was permitted.

As mentioned, SPC was only permitted to provide Private Lines, not switched services. When MCI Communications released Execunet, SPC took the FCC to court to get the right to offer switched services, and succeeded (the "Execunet II" decision). They decided they needed a new name to differentiate the switched voice service from SpeedFAX, and ran an internal contest to select one. The winning entry was "Sprint"; the name was never intended to have any special significance, although after it achieved wider public awareness there were attempts to turn it into a backronym.[6]

The Sprint service was first marketed to six metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Diego and Anaheim. The switches were located in Los Angeles and New York. A customer was required to have a Private Line connection to one of these switches in order to use the service, and paid an access fee per Private Line. The customer was then billed at 2.6 cents per tenth of a minute increment.

In 1982 SPC became part of GTE under the name GTE Sprint. GTE had previously acquired a national X.25 provider, Telenet, in 1979.