I’ve now made two changes to how the site handles company names.

I’ve now merged the disparate ways the site was displaying names. Thousands block company names were often formatted different than the normal ten-thousands block data. This is because the data comes from two seperate sources.

This has now been rectified.

The other change is that the company that currently owns the company is shown below the normal name in the telco view (npa-nxx lookup). I haven’t added this to the other pages on the site yet, though I plan to.

One may ask: “Why do you have it say “Ameritech Michigan” at all, rather than SBC, AT&T, at&t, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week?”. The reason is simple - They still legally operate under the name they are licensed under. Since in michigan, for example, they are licensed as “Ameritech Michigan”, and have not filed for any updates in their company’s name with the proper authorities, they’re still called “Ameritech Michigan”, and still operate as their own company in many respects.

The parent company owns all these little companies, and while they are merged in the traditional business sense, they do exist in some respects as seperate entities for regulatory purposes. That’s why they still show their company’s main name. Also, in things like Nextel and Sprint, I could call them both sprint, but that would not help you figure out which of the two business units they run as, since they really are two companies internally, basically (as are Cingular wireless and the old AT&T wireless, believe me, I’ve spent enough time on hold to find this out the hard way. :) )

Anyway, I’m looking for comments on the implementation. Do you like it? Let me know. Do you hate it? Let me know (and say why).