The ink is dry on another Archtop Fiber deal as the service provider has finalized its acquisition of Hancock Telephone Company.
Based in Hancock, New York, Hancock Telephone Company has served nearly 2,000 customers in the state’s Delaware County and northeastern Pennsylvania for more than 100 years. The company’s long-time owners, the Wrighter family, recently upgraded from copper to fiber using a G-PON architecture with Adtran as their platform.
“Since our Archtop build schema is following these same basic building blocks, the only upgrade in the near term will be to the cards and [customer premise equipment], allowing us to deploy 8-gig service,” said Jeff DeMond, Chairman and CEO of Archtop Fiber.
Selling the family-owned telecom provider was not a decision made lightly, Hancock Telephone President Rob Wrighter said in a statement, but he added that as a part of Archtop the company will now be able to extend its reach into Sullivan County and “farther into Pennsylvania.”
Archtop has already been awarded funding by two counties within Hancock’s footprint to complete some edge-out construction, and recently applied for nearly $20 million in funding through the PA Broadband Development Authority. It also recently submitted applications in Pennsylvania to construct a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) expansion in Wayne County, where Hancock currently serves.
The Hancock deal follows the closure of Archtop’s acquisition of New York-based GTel. These acquisitions are part of Archtop’s strategy to bring 100% fiber multi-gig Internet to underserved communities in New York’s Hudson Valley and beyond.
Like Hancock, GTel had already been converted to G-PON and will require “little by way of conversion beyond upgrading to XGS-PON multi-gig capability,” DeMond told Fierce Telecom. Additionally, he said “an aggressive edge-out plan” is currently underway to add several thousand passings in Columbia County and intersect with Archtop’s greenfield build in Hudson, New York.
Both of Archtop’s completed acquisitions participated in the NY Broadband grant program and completed their required buildout obligations in time, according to DeMond. Archtop, as required by the program, will maintain any outstanding obligations through the end of the five-year term determined by the Empire State Development Corporation.
Archtop's acquisition efforts likely won't stop here. In May, it also announced an agreement with Momentum Telecom to purchase its New York-based Warwick Valley Telephone Co, though the deal is still pending regulatory approval.
Archtop is targeting a total of 500,000 XGS-PON passings in New York’s Hudson Valley over the next several years. A first phase of Archtop’s greenfield buildout announced earlier this year included approximately 2,300 miles of construction to well over 120,000 individual locations.
DeMond said that buildout is “well underway with the core network lit and distribution fiber presently being permitted and constructed according to plan.”
In addition to serving markets in New York and Pennsylvania, Archtop has also indicated it is interested in expanding to Massachusetts.
**10/3/23 Update: An earlier version of this article attributed comments to an "Archtop Fiber representative," who the company later clarified is CEO Jeff DeMond.