Dobson Communications Corp.

I'll research this company before writing the profile.

Company overview. Dobson Communications Corporation (Nasdaq: DCEL) was a wireless telecommunications carrier headquartered at 14201 Wireless Way, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Its corporate lineage traces to an Oklahoma wireline telephone network formed in the 1920s; it entered wireless service in 1990 in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle. It was publicly traded until AT&T Inc. agreed on June 29, 2007 to acquire it for $2.8 billion ($13/share); the transaction closed November 15, 2007, and Dobson was folded into AT&T Mobility. It no longer operates as an independent company.

Operations. Dobson was among the largest rural and suburban wireless carriers in the U.S. The Justice Department described it as the ninth-largest U.S. mobile carrier, serving roughly 1.7 million subscribers in 17 states with about $1.3 billion in 2006 revenue. It marketed service under the Cellular One brand (rights purchased from Alltel in December 2005), operated GSM/GPRS/EDGE and TDMA networks primarily on 850 MHz licenses, and supplied roaming capacity to larger carriers such as Cingular/AT&T Wireless. It also owned Cellular One Properties LLC, which licensed the Cellular One brand to roughly nine other carriers (DOJ/Federal Register, 2007; Wikipedia, Dobson Cellular).

Patent-litigation posture. Purely defensive: 0 plaintiff cases, 2 defendant cases. Both tracked appearances are as a defendant in the Freedom Wireless prepaid-wireless patent campaign, one in a plaintiff-friendly venue (Eastern District of Texas) and one in the District of Massachusetts. Dobson appears to have been targeted as a downstream user of prepaid billing technology rather than as an enforcer of its own patents.

Notable cases. Freedom Wireless, Inc. v. Centennial Cellular Operating Co. et al. (D. Mass., filed 2005-05-20) and Freedom Wireless, Inc. v. American Cellular Corp. et al. (E.D. Tex., filed 2007-04-19). American Cellular was Dobson's joint venture with AT&T Wireless. Both filings predate Dobson's absorption into AT&T. External context: Freedom Wireless, a Phoenix patent holder, won a $128 million Boston verdict in May 2005 against BCGI and several carriers over the same prepaid-billing patent family (Law.com; Daily Record, 2005). No tracked cases post-date the 2007 acquisition.