ALEXANDRIA, Va.-Rural Cellular Corp. said it will acquire all of the outstanding shares of the Saco River Telegraph and Telephone Co.
Saco River provides wireless and independent local exchange carrier telecommunications services to southern Maine and eastern New Hampshire. RCC plans to acquire Saco River’s metropolitan service area in Portsmouth, Maine, and the carrier’s basic trading areas in Manchester and Nashua, N.H., and Portland, Maine. Saco River’s network uses Code Division Multiple Access technology and served about 20,000 subscribers at the end of April. The personal communications services licenses are not built out and cover about 1.1 million pops. These licenses are contiguous to RCC’s existing Northeast properties.
RCC uses Time Division Multiple Access technology and said it hasn’t decided whether it will replace Saco River’s network with the technology.
RCC head Richard Ekstrand said his company is open to operating both technologies if that decision is beneficial to its roaming partners.
