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Cincinnati Bell is a 150 year old company, and it was bought less than a year earlier by Macquarie Infrastructure Partners in a 2.9 billion dollar transaction, WVXU reported. On 2 March 2022 it announced that it would begin doing business as altafiber in Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana. The Hawaiian Telcom business and the CBTS IT services arm were unaffected, and the transition was expected to take six to nine months.

The company's announcement tied the name to its network strategy. It said it had invested more than 1 billion dollars in fiber, already offered fiber to the premises to about 60 per cent of addresses in Greater Cincinnati, and planned to reach every home and business address in that territory within five years, while building beyond it in Greene County, Ohio, Greendale, Indiana, and a new regional base in Dayton. The new brand, it said, captured the transformation into a fiber company positioned to serve customers for the next 150 years.

Chief executive Leigh Fox explained the name to WVXU. The word alta, he said, is rooted in a word that means elevated, and that is what altafiber does: provide an elevated connection through fiber and raise the standard of service. He described the fiber investment, the geographic expansion and the Macquarie partnership as a clear inflection point. Fox also insisted that the company remained the local hometown company with 2,000 employees, that leadership was staying, and that the old name would live on in the Bell Charitable Foundation. WVXU noted the question of what would happen to the streetcar sponsorship, the Cincinnati Bell Connector, which was in transition.

The logic is sound. Bell is a regional legacy word that means landline, and Cincinnati is a geographic limit for a company building fiber in other towns. The execution is weaker. Altafiber is a generic coinage, lowercase and descriptive, which could belong to any of the many fiber startups chasing the same broadband subsidies. Trading a century of civic recognition for that is a real cost, and the promise of elevation is the kind of explanation that only makes sense in a press release. The company kept its heritage in a charity name; the brand itself is a fresh, rather anonymous start.