Shentel is hitting the gas on its Glo Fiber high-speed internet business in the wake of the sale of its mobile business to T-Mobile. In the past month, Shentel announced three separate fiber builds in the mid-Atlantic.
The company announced a Glo Fiber build in Frederick County, Virginia late last month. This month, the company announced builds in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and Suffolk, Virginia.
The Suffolk plans, announced Thursday, are notable in that Suffolk is in eastern Virginia and in the fast growing area of Tidewater, Virginia. Previously Shentel has focused on the western part of the state, as well as the Appalachian region.
Glo Fiber uses XGS-PON technology, a technology we have been seeing more of recently. On Wednesday, Frontier said it had deployed XGS-PON to 100,000 homes.
While service providers deploying fiber-to-the-home have relied in large part on GPON for more than a decade, some are moving to XGS-PON so that they can offer multi-gigabit speeds.
Shentel already has launched Glo Fiber service in multiple markets and according to the company’s web page, there are three Glo Fiber speed tiers, including 300 Mbps for $65, 1 Gbps for $80 and 2 Gbps for $250.
Shentel started life decades ago as a telephone service provider serving part of rural Virginia. More recently, the company operated a mobile network for Sprint that for some years generated a large portion of Shentel revenues. But when T-Mobile bought Sprint, it exercised an option to buy the Shentel mobile business – a deal that was completed in July.
Shentel is wasting no time pursuing new sources of revenue. In addition to the Glo Fiber initiatives, Shentel also offers fixed wireless broadband under the name Beam Internet and has been rapidly expanding that business as well.
