Trademark Class 38: Telecommunications
Telecommunications services, including transmission of data, voice and broadcasting.
What class 38 covers
Class 38 is one of the 45 international classes used by the USPTO and most trademark offices worldwide, under the Nice Classification. Classes 1 to 34 cover goods — physical products — and classes 35 to 45 cover services. Class 38 is a services class.
You register a mark for particular goods or services, not in the abstract. That is why the same word can be owned by unrelated businesses in different classes, and why picking the right class matters as much as picking the right name.
Typically included in class 38
- Mobile and fixed telephone services
- Internet service provision
- Video and voice transmission
- Broadcasting services
- Messaging and chat services
- Satellite communications
Business types that usually file here
- Telecom carriers
- ISPs
- Messaging app companies
- Broadcasting networks
- Satellite operators
- VoIP providers
Notable brands operating in class 38
Companies whose goods or services fall wholly or partly within this class. This is a list of well-known names in the space, not a ranking — there is no authoritative public measure of trademark "size", and most of these businesses hold registrations across several classes rather than this one alone.
- AT&T
- Verizon
- T-Mobile
- Comcast
- Charter Communications
- Lumen Technologies
- Frontier
- Dish Network
- EchoStar
- Iridium
- Viasat
- Starlink
- Zoom
- RingCentral
- Twilio
- Vonage
- Bandwidth
- Cogent
- Akamai
- Cloudflare
- Level 3
- US Cellular
- Cable One
- Altice USA
- Liberty Broadband
Choosing the right class
Three mistakes cost applicants the most in this area:
- Filing in too few classes. If you sell a product and also provide a service around it, that is often two classes. Registering only one leaves the other unprotected.
- Filing in too many. Each class costs a separate fee, and the USPTO expects you to be using the mark, or to have a genuine intent to use it, for everything you list.
- Ignoring related classes. Examiners routinely treat certain classes as related — clothing and clothing retail, for instance, or food products and restaurant services. A conflict in a related class can block you just as effectively as one in your own.
Our search checks related classes automatically, so a conflict in an adjacent class shows up rather than being silently ignored.