Talk:Communications service provider

Merge with Telephone Company

Communications Service Provider is listed as one synonym of Telephone Company in that article. I would propose to merge the present article (CSP) with the Telephone Company article. While Telephone Companies traditionaly were exactly the same as CSPs, they have evolved to general purpose communications service providers.

Furthermore, the present article is very terse and lacks many information that is available in the Telephone Company article.

What should be the main title of the merged article? In the industry, generally, the term Communications Service Provider is preferred and telco / telephone company is considered too restrictive. (It is not only about telephones). --Bikebot (talk) 15:14, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Further thinking about this proposal: What about Cable operators? They are also Communications service providers but not really Telephone companies. So maybe, we should keep CSP and add some links to different types of CSPs, such as Telephone Companies, Cable Operators, Telecommunications service providers

--Bikebot (talk) 15:34, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

There is no doubt considerable overlap, at least in the USA and to a lesser extent in some other countries, but the two industries have very different histories, and the CATV article is rather large already. So no, I think this article should continue small, with perhaps some improvements to make clear that the other two are handling the load for their respective industries. Eventually this distinction won't make much difference and some kind of merger or other article rearrangement will be in order. Heck, by that time, there may only be Internet access companies anyway and the separate phone and cable company articles will be strictly historical ones. Jim.henderson (talk) 02:26, 24 January 2012 (UTC)