Fiber-to-the-premises provider GigFire has acquired Rural Comm, a service provider headquartered in Farina, IL.
GigFire, which now operates in ten Midwestern states, was known as LTD Broadband until earlier this year. The company says that it will serve more than 150 communities in Illinois and upgrade them to provide gigabit speeds.
Rural Comm offers fixed wireless using 60 GHz technology and fiber broadband.
“We are excited about our acquisition of Rural Comm,” GigFire CEO Corey Hauer said in a press release. “We look forward to growing our footprint in Illinois and transforming the network to offer gigabit speeds. We were fortunate to acquire great talent through this acquisition and are elated to welcome them to the GigFire team. We will continue to hire local talent in the area to further expand our team for our ambitious FTTH expansion plans.”
The company – then operating as LTD Broadband — was a top ten winner in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) auction with winning bids totaling $1,320,920,718.60. However, the FCC found that its long form application did not demonstrate that it could deliver on what it promised and rejected it last August.
The rejection of LTD’s bid had been expected. Less than a month earlier the FCC proposed fines totaling $4.3 million against 73 companies for defaulted RDOF bids. More than half of the fines were aimed at LTD. The proposed fine against LTD Broadband involved 768 census block groups centered in Kansas and Oklahoma.
LTD’s history is as a fixed wireless access (FWA) provider, though its RDOF initiative would have required the company to deploy fiber broadband.
