C Spire

C Spire, formerly known as Cellular South, Inc.,^[1] is a privately owned technology company headquartered in Ridgeland, Mississippi. The company consists of three business divisions – C Spire Wireless, C Spire Home Fiber, and C Spire Business.

C Spire

C Spire's corporate headquarters in Ridgeland, Mississippi
Trade name	C Spire
Type	Subsidiary
Industry	Telecommunications
Founded	1988; 35 years ago (1988)
Founder	Wade H. Creekmore Jr. and James H. "Jimmy" Creekmore Sr.
Headquarters	Ridgeland, Mississippi , United States
Number of locations	72 stores, 2 call centers, 4 data centers, 6 sales offices
Area served	Tennessee Mississippi Alabama Florida Panhandle
Key people	Hu Meena – CEO
Products	Wireless voice and data, Fiber to the Home, Cloud Services, Managed IT Services
Parent	Telapex, Inc.
Website	cspire.com

C Spire Wireless 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 Fiber, which launched one of the nation's first Gigabit speed Fiber to the Home efforts in 2013, provides 1,000 Megabits per second residential fiber internet access for thousands of consumers in Mississippi and Alabama. ^[2]

C Spire Business offers VoIP business phone systems, cloud services, network solutions, as well as IT hardware and software platforms for businesses.

C Spire is owned by the holding company Telapex, Inc.,^[3] 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.^[4] In January 2021, the company announced it would be investing US$1 billion over four years to deploy broadband internet to serve more than 200,000 homes and businesses in Mississippi and Alabama and support the expansion of 5G access.^[5]

In 2006 the firm opened its first sales center outside of its native network footprint.^[6] In 2009, the company purchased Alabama-based Corr Wireless, which expanded its coverage in Alabama and moved it into Georgia for the first time (in 2013 Corr Wireless was subsequently sold to AT&T^[7]).

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.^[8]

In Oct. 2019, C Spire launched C Spire Health,^[9] a mobile app to provide health care for people in Mississippi, especially those in rural and under served areas, with minor ailments.^[10]

C Spire announced a partnership^[11] with Alabama Power on Dec. 5, 2019, to bring Gigabit speed (1000 Mbit/s) 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 (ARBC), 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,^[12] in 2020.

In July 2021, C Spire completed the acquisition of Harbor Communications. With this acquisition, the company is providing fiber-based broadband internet access and related services to several cities and towns in Mobile and Baldwin counties on Alabama's Gulf Coast. ^[13]

In October 2021, C Spire announced it will acquire Alabama-based telecommunications provider Troy Cablevision in a deal subject to regulatory approval. Troy Cablevision was founded in 1985 and offers cable, internet and other services to businesses and residents in Pike, Coffee, Crenshaw and Dale counties. It has offices in Troy, Elba, Enterprise, Luverne and Ozark.^[14]

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.^[15]

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.^[16]

In 2013, C Spire created Vu Digital, LLC as a wholly owned subsidiary.^[17] The name "Vu" is pronounced "view" and is inspired by the phrase "your view of things".^[17] Vu is used as a web content aggregator with heuristics, allowing it to improve its aggregation selections based on user preferences.^[17] 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.^[17][18] Vu Video-to-Data (V2D) translates video images and audio to text, affording video producers the ability to tag their content with metadata making it more searchable.^[19][20]

Network

Radio frequency summary

Further information: LTE frequency bands and 5G NR frequency bands

The following is a list of known LTE and NR frequency bands which C Spire employs. 2G/3G CDMA was discontinued in 2022.^[21]

Frequency range	Band number	Protocol	Generation	Status	Notes
700 MHz Lower A/B/C Blocks	12	LTE/LTE-A	4G	Active	Primary LTE coverage bands.
850 MHz CLR	5
1.7/2.1 GHz AWS	4				Additional LTE bands for capacity.
1.9 GHz PCS	2
600 MHz DD	n71	NR	5G	Active/Building Out	Primary 5G coverage bands.
700 MHz Lower A/B/C Blocks	n12
1.9 GHz PCS	n2				Additional 5G band for capacity.
2.5 GHz BRS/EBS	n41				Primary mid-band frequency.
3.7 GHz C-Band	n77			Pending deployment	Spectrum will be available for use starting in December 2023.^[22]
28 GHz mmWave	n261			Active/Building Out	Primary mmWave frequency. Only available in select areas.

References

1. "Fictitious Business Name Registration" (PDF). Business.sos.state.ms.us. Retrieved 2012-10-24.^{[permanent dead link]}
2. "C Spire prepping gigabit 'Fiber to the Home' service, asks where to put it".
3. "Telapex, Inc". Telapex.com. Retrieved 2012-10-25.
4. "View Article". Technologyalliance.ms. Archived from the original on 2013-02-19. Retrieved 2012-10-25.
5. "C Spire to invest $1 billion in 5G, fiber broadband in Alabama, Mississippi". February 2021. from the original on 2021-02-01.
6. dynamics, MVNO (October 21, 2011). . MVNO Dynamics. Archived from the original on December 22, 2016. Retrieved December 22, 2016.
7. "AT&T to buy spectrum, 21,000 customers from C Spire's Corr subsidiary". FierceWireless. 2013-04-05. Retrieved 2015-08-07.
8. "C Spire Acquires TekLinks for Managed Cloud Business Services". 2018-06-26.
9. "C Spire Health".
10. "C Spire, University of Mississippi Medical Center debut new mobile health app".
11. "New partnerships bringing ultra-fast internet to Alabama". 4 December 2019.
12. "Alabama Rural Broadband Coalition, C Spire announce expansion in Jasper". 21 November 2019.
13. "C Spire wraps integration of Harbor Communications".
14. "Mississippi-based C Spire buys Troy Cablevision". from the original on 2021-10-20.
15. History/Timeline December 25, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
16. "How the 8th-largest cell carrier beat T-Mobile to the iPhone | CNN Business". CNN. 4 November 2011.
17. McDill, Stephen (2013-08-02). . Mississippi Business Journal. Archived from the original on 2015-11-18. Retrieved 2015-11-18.
18. Ha, Anthony (2015-05-04). . TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. Retrieved 2015-11-18.
19. Chandler, Clay (2015-05-07). "Video-to-data technology will be 'transformative'". The Clarion-Ledger. Archived from the original on 2016-02-02. Retrieved 2016-02-02.
20. Winslow, George (2015-05-05). . Broadcasting & Cable. Archived from the original on 2015-11-18. Retrieved 2015-11-18.
21. Spire, C. (October 11, 2021). "Upgrade Alert: 3G Network to Shut Down in 2022". blog.cspire.com. Retrieved 2022-09-04.
22. Dano, News Analysis Mike; Director, Editorial; 5G; Strategies 2/24/2021, Mobile. "Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile: Here are the C-band auction results". Light Reading. Retrieved 2021-02-25.