Bell Canada

Bell Canada (commonly referred to as Bell) is a Canadian telecommunications company headquartered at 1 Carrefour Alexander-Graham-Bell in the borough of Verdun, Quebec, in Canada. It is an ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec; as such, it was a founding member of the Stentor Alliance. It is also a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) for enterprise customers in the western provinces.

Its subsidiary Bell Aliant provides services in the Atlantic provinces. It provides mobile service through its Bell Mobility (including flanker brand Virgin Plus) subsidiary, and television through its Bell Satellite TV (direct broadcast satellite) and Bell Fibe TV (IPTV) subsidiaries.

Bell Canada's principal competitors are: Rogers Communications in Ontario and Western Canada, Telus Communications in Quebec and Western Canada, Quebecor (Videotron) in Quebec plus other Global Wireless Infrastructure Providers such as American Tower. The company serves over 13 million phone lines and is headquartered at the Campus Bell complex in the borough of Verdun in Montreal.

Bell Canada is one of the main assets of the holding company BCE Inc., an abbreviation of its full name, Bell Canada Enterprises. In addition to the Bell Canada telecommunications properties, BCE also owns Bell Media (which operates mass media properties including the national CTV Television Network) and holds significant interests in the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey club and Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, owner of several Toronto professional sports franchises. BCE ranked number 301 on the 2021 edition of the Forbes Global 2000 list.

Historically, Bell Canada has been one of Canada's most important and most powerful companies and, in 1975, was listed as the fifth largest in the country. The company is named after the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who also co-founded Bell Telephone Company in Boston, Massachusetts. Bell Canada operated as the Canadian subsidiary of the Bell System from 1880 to 1975. However, unlike the other regional Bell operating companies, Bell Canada had its own research and development labs.

In the mid-1870s, Alexander Graham Bell, who was Scottish-born but lived in Canada, invented an analogue electromagnetic telecommunication device that could simultaneously transmit and receive human speech. In March 1876 he successfully patented his invention in the United States under the title of "Improvement In Telegraphy" (U.S. patent 174,465). His device later adopted the name now used worldwide, the telephone. Bell also patented it in Canada and transferred 75% of the Canadian patent rights to his father, Alexander Melville Bell, with the remaining 25% being awarded to Boston telephone manufacturer Charles Williams Jr. in exchange for 1,000 telephones to be provided to the Canadian market. This order could not be fulfilled due to surging demand in the United States.

For a few years, the senior Bell and his friend and business associate Reverend Thomas Philip Henderson collected royalties from the lease of telephones to customers in the limited late-1870s Canadian market, who either operated their own private telephone lines or subscribed to a third party telecommunications service provider.

In 1879, Bell's father sold his Canadian rights to the National Bell Telephone Company, formed in Boston, Massachusetts earlier that year by the merger of the Bell Telephone Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company, which in 1880 reorganized as the American Bell Telephone Company, initiating the Bell System. That same year the Canadian division was renamed to "The Bell Telephone Company of Canada Ltd.", eventually to be headed by U.S. executive Charles Fleetford Sise from Chicago who served as its first general manager.