C Spire, formerly known as Cellular South, Inc., is a privately owned technology company headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi. The company consists of three business divisions – C Spire Wireless, C Spire Home, and C Spire Business. C Spire Wireless is the seventh-largest wireless carrier in the United States and the largest privately held mobile communications company. C Spire operates more than 1,200 cell sites with 9,000 route miles of buried fiber optic cable. C Spire owns and has access to low, mid and high-band wireless spectrum in its primary service areas. The unit offers 4G LTE mobile services and is investing for 5G, the next generation of cellular service. C Spire has customers in Mississippi, the Memphis Metropolitan Area, the Florida Panhandle, and parts of Alabama including Mobile. C Spire sells plans and devices for prepaid and postpaid customers and was the first wireless carrier to offer free incoming calls to those customers. C Spire Home, which launched one of the nation's first Gigabit speed Fiber to the Home efforts in 2013, provides 1,000 Megabits per second internet access, live streaming TV and digital home phone services to thousands of consumers in more than 20 Mississippi markets. C Spire is owned by the holding company Telapex, Inc., which also owns Telepak Networks, Inc., and several smaller Mississippi telecoms.
Growth and recognition
Since 1999, C Spire has invested more than US$700 million in its wireless network, including constructing 1,403 cell sites, a high-speed wireless broadband network and a permanent microwave ring for redundancy across the Gulf Coast region. In 2006 the firm opened its first sales center outside of its native network footprint. In 2009, the company purchased Alabama-based Corr Wireless, which expanded its coverage in Alabama and moved it into Georgia for the first time. The company's wireless division announced on September 22, 2011 that it planned on rebranding from Cellular South to C Spire Wireless to be put into effect on September 26 of that year. In 2018, the company purchased Teklinks, based in Birmingham, Alabama, to expand their footprint in the commercial and enterprise business, as well as their geographical footprint in the southeast. In Oct. 2019, C Spire announced the launch of C Spire Health, a mobile app to provide health care for people in Mississippi, especially those in rural and under served areas, with minor ailments. C Spire announced a partnership with Alabama Power on Dec. 5, 2019, to bring Gigabit speed internet services to the Birmingham area, as well as Shelby County and other parts of Alabama, in 2020. C Spire is a member of the Alabama Rural Broadband Coalition, which is focused on rural broadband expansion. As part of the ARBC, C Spire also will be helping expand rural broadband access to Jasper, Alabama, in 2020.
History
Cellular South, Inc. began its wireless service on the Mississippi Gulf Coast on February 4, 1988, using AMPS technology. Former football quarterback Archie Manning made the company's inaugural call from Gulfport, Mississippi to then U.S. Representative Trent Lott in Washington, D.C. In 2011, C Spire became the fourth wireless carrier in the U.S., behind AT&T, Sprint and Verizon and ahead of T-Mobile, to be able to sell the iPhone. In 2013, C Spire created Vu Digital, LLC as a wholly owned subsidiary. The name "Vu" is pronounced "view" and is inspired by the phrase "your view of things". Vu is used as a web content aggregator with heuristics, allowing it to improve its aggregation selections based on user preferences. Its initial product was "a cloud-based digital profiling and analytics system" that provided "web personalization". Digital announced Video-To-Data analysis and metadata tagging in May 2015. Vu Video-to-Data translates video images and audio to text, affording video producers the ability to tag their content with metadata making it more searchable.
