Company overview. MobileTel, Inc. was a small rural wireless carrier headquartered at 112 West 10th Street, Larose, Louisiana (Lafourche Parish). It was established in 1989 as a rural cellular provider and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of SJI, Inc., a private, Larose-based telecommunications holding company, and was affiliated with Lafourche Telephone Company, Inc. Ownership is private; no public ticker exists. No reliable public figures for revenue or total headcount were found — contemporaneous press reported that roughly 50 MobileTel/SJI employees would transfer with the sale of its wireless business. The company's FCC Form 499 filer record (FRN 0001714617) remains linked to Alltel Mobile of Louisiana, LLC, and SJI, LLC was later acquired by Eatel (2012).
Products / operations. MobileTel provided cellular service in south Louisiana, including Block B rural service area (RSA) licenses for Louisiana 8 (St. James) and Louisiana 9 (Plaquemines), plus prepaid cellular, paging and Internet service (marketed as Mobiletel Internet). At the time of its sale, press reports described about 26,000 wireless subscribers and seven retail locations across Terrebonne, Lafourche, Assumption and St. Mary parishes. It is not an NPE: it held FCC licenses and operated retail and network infrastructure.
Patent-litigation posture. MobileTel appears once in the tracked data, exclusively as a defendant (0 plaintiff, 1 defendant) — the profile of an operating company targeted by a patent assertion rather than an asserter.
Notable case. Freedom Wireless, Inc. v. Centennial Cellular Operating Co. et al., No. 1:05-cv-11062 (D. Mass., filed May 20, 2005), with Mobiletel, Inc. named alongside BTC Mobility, Centennial Cellular Operating Co. and other small regional carriers. Freedom Wireless asserted prepaid-wireless patents developed by inventors Douglas Fougnies and Dan Harned; the case was venued in Massachusetts, not a plaintiff-friendly Texas district. In the related Boston trial, a jury awarded $128 million in May 2005, with damages assessed against Boston Communications Group, Cingular, AT&T Wireless, CMT Partners and Western Wireless — Mobiletel is not listed among those assessed. The Federal Circuit appeal (206 F. App'x 973) was dismissed by agreement in 2006. Note that MobileTel's wireless assets had been sold to Alltel in a transaction announced July 2004 and closed January 2005, shortly before this suit.