Canada’s biggest rural broadband company has expanded its space in the southwestern Ontario market by buying internet and fibre-to-home provider Silo Wireless.
New Brunswick-based Xplornet Communications, whose client list already includes over a million rural customers in all provinces, announced it has closed its deal to buy Silo for an undisclosed sum.
The deal gives Xplornet over 100 fixed wireless towers, including LTE sites, as well as Silo’s fibre-to-the-home network in the region and the Brantford-based company’s customer list.
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Silo customers “can expect the same friendly, local service as Xplornet integrates the networks, and upgrades sites with LTE and unlimited data,” Xplornet said in a release Thursday.
Xplornet also said Silo’s fibre-to-the-home network lines up with its own previously announced fibre expansion plans in eastern Ontario and Atlantic Canada, while the Ontario company’s over-the-air assets “complement” its own holdings and spectrum in the region.
Xplornet in September picked up $16 million in federal funding for a project to set up over 600 km of fibre optic cable as well as 5G-ready broadband infrastructure in eastern Ontario, which it expects to complete in 2022.
The company has already been active in southwestern Ontario for years, having bought Everus Communications’ operations out of receivership in 2010.
In Xplornet’s release Thursday, Silo CEO Andreas Wiatowski said the Ontario company “has been connecting the region for almost 13 years using some of the latest fibre and wireless technologies” and tying those in with Xplornet’s spectrum holdings “will allow for unprecedented access and speeds.”
“This is an exciting time for our company and in particular for our customers in this region,” Xplornet executive vice-president Bill Macdonald said in the same release. “We are making major investments in our network to give our customers more: faster speeds, unlimited data, and access to the latest 5G-ready internet services.”
Xplornet announced a deal in September to sub-license 40MHz of AWS-4 spectrum, which it said covers most rural households across all 10 provinces and would allow it to build a national 5G wireless broadband network for rural Canadians. — Glacier FarmMedia Network
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