Centennial Cellular Operating Co. LLC ("CCOC") is the principal domestic wireless operating subsidiary of Centennial Communications Corp. (formerly Centennial Cellular Corp.), a Delaware corporation. The parent was organized in 1988 and was headquartered in Wall, New Jersey (earlier New Canaan, Connecticut and Neptune, New Jersey). It was publicly traded on Nasdaq under ticker CYCL, majority-owned by Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe following a 1998 take-private, and was acquired by AT&T Inc. in November 2009 for roughly $944–945 million plus about $2 billion in assumed debt. CCOC is now a subsidiary within AT&T. For the fiscal year ended May 31, 2009, the parent reported consolidated revenue of about $1.05 billion and roughly 1.1 million wireless subscribers.
Operations. Centennial was a regional wireless and broadband carrier. On the U.S. mainland it sold voice and data wireless service (GSM/EDGE/GPRS) to retail subscribers in two clusters: parts of Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, and parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. In Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands it ran CDMA/EV-DO service, offered fixed wireless broadband under the name "Instant Internet," and — as a competitive local exchange carrier — provided switched voice, private line, VoIP, international long distance, data and Internet services over a roughly 1,400 route-mile fiber network serving about 2,500 buildings. It is an operating company, not a patent-assertion entity.
Litigation posture. The tracked data show a single appearance, as a defendant, in Freedom Wireless, Inc. v. Centennial Cellular Operating Co. et al., filed May 20, 2005 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. That is the signature of an operating company being sued, not a licensor asserting patents: zero plaintiff-side cases. Venue was Massachusetts, not the Eastern District of Texas.
Context. Freedom Wireless (successor to Cellexis) asserted prepaid-wireless patents against carriers and prepaid platform provider Boston Communications Group (BCGI); that consolidated litigation produced a jury verdict against BCGI and carriers including Cingular, AT&T Wireless, Western Wireless and CMT Partners before a 2006 settlement. Centennial's appearance reflects its role as a regional carrier offering prepaid service, not any patent holdings of its own.