Ritter, Great Plains Communications to Combine

There was a key bit of consolidation announced in the fiber world yesterday, albeit an in-house project. Great Plains Communications and Ritter Communications will be merging into a single entity under the brand RightFiber.

Both companies are, of course, within the portfolio of Grain Management, which has quietly specialized in acquiring and operating such assets for a long time. Both companies also have roots in the RLEC world stretching back more than a century. Grain clearly feels it’s time to turn two established and respected regional brands into a larger and hopefully more efficient supra-regional one.

Great Plains Communications operates wholesale, business, and residential infrastructure centered on Nebraska but reaching out into Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Kansas, Colorado, and Wyoming. Ritter Communications does similarly in Arkansas and out into Tennessee, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. There’s no overlap there, but there is certianly adjacency.

The combined company will serve some 400 communities across 20 states, connecting 300K homes and operating 28,000 miles of regional fiber network. It will operate under the brand RightFiber, which is the fiber brand that Ritter Communications has built over the last decade.

They will look to the integration first and continue both company’s organic expansion projects, but Grain may also view RightFiber as a consolidation platform.

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