1897-2008: From Clifton Forge-Waynesboro Telephone Company to nTelos

K.W. Stanley / "History in the Valley"
Published: June 23, 2008

The company that became nTelos was initiated as the Appleman and Fishburne Company above Fishburne and Sons Pharmacy at Main and Wayne in the mid-1890s.
This fledgling telephone company was purchased by Newton Clarke Watts in 1900 and renamed Waynesboro Mutual Telephone.
Watts founded the Clifton Forge Telephone Company in 1897. Leta Watts, his daughter, merged the two companies as the Clifton Forge-Waynesboro Telephone Company (CFW) in September 1929 with an office on Mulberry (now Broad) in Waynesboro. CFW expanded as businesses located in the town.
Lines were extended to Fishersville in the 1930s. In November 1940, lines were extended to Lyndhurst.
By February 1938, switchboard capacity expanded from 1,100 to 1,400 telephones. Four-digit calls were made to operators on lines serving several families (party lines).
Conversion to rotary dial was made in August 1948. By 1951, the company served Clifton Forge, Covington, Waynesboro, Lexington, Buena Vista, Natural Bridge and Raphine.
A direct distant dialing system that by-passed the operator was initiated by April 1966. Long-distance calls increased 13.6 percent by 1967.
CFW Intelos opened a CFW Wireless Center in the Waynesboro Industrial Park by October 1997. In November 1998, CFW opened the CFW Communication Center in the industrial park.
CFW Intelos opened a retail store at 2704 West Main for new products and services in September 1998. The store offered local and long-distance service, wireless digital telephone service, cellular and paging service, Internet service and residential or business alarm service.
By November 1998, CFW Intelos initiated a faster transmission service for customers, DSL with a rate of 768 kilobits per second.
CFW purchased 5.38 acres in the Waynesboro Industrial Park in late 1999. Waynesboro bought the land for $174,853 and sold it to CFW for $49,954.
In February 2000, CFW started construction of a 51,000-square-foot building to house 230 employees. By late 2000, CFW employed 521 people as the second largest private employer in Waynesboro.
CFW Intelos merged with R&B Communications, a southwest Virginia telecom company, in May 2000. By July 2000, CFW Intelos purchased a subsidiary of Bell Atlantic, Prime Company’s PCS licenses for the Richmond and Tidewater markets, for more than $408 million, and became a major telecom company in the Mid-Atlantic region.
The merger provided CFW Intelos with a customer base of 8.3 million people and 150,000 wireless customers. In 2000, CFW was renamed nTelos.
nTelos filed for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2003, and ownership of the company was transferred to creditors. By October 2004, nTelos emerged from the bankruptcy and Morgan Stanley had gained 94 percent control of the company’s assets through reorganization and their agreement to forgive $659 million in debt in exchange for equity control.
nTelos had signed agreements to accommodate wireless to landline calls for T-Mobile, Suncom and Sprint in markets that included Virginia, West Virginia, the Outer Banks of North Carolina and parts of Kentucky and Ohio.
After the Virginia Cable Competition Act went into effect in July 2006, nTelos announced plans to expand service using fiber optic cables to provide Internet, telephone and television service to customers within targeted subdivisions in its service area.
K.W. Stanley is a Waynesboro resident, historian and TNV correspondent. Contact him at .