SERGEANT BLUFF, Iowa—Local telecommunications provider Long Lines L.L.C. will launch wireless service later this summer to customers in northeast Nebraska, southeast South Dakota and western Iowa.
The company in December acquired two small wireless providers, Great Lakes of Iowa Inc. and Siouxland PCS, which served northwestern Iowa. Long Lines has been working for more than a year to prepare its GSM network for launch, and says that it expects to have about 70 cellular towers in service by the time it launches, with another 51 to be added by the end of this year.Long Lines also acquired a 155-mile fiber network, and sells packages of telephone, cable television and high-speed Internet services to about 100 communities in Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. The addition of wireless will enable the company to have a quadruple-play offering once it launches wireless service; according to company spokesman Graham Gillette, Long Lines hopes that will be by mid-July, with retail stores in western Iowa and expansion later this year into northern Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota.
“In most of the towns where we will have stores, we also offer local/long distance, cable TV and Internet,” said Gillette. “We’re pretty confident that we’re going to be able to be pretty competitive in each of those offerings.”
Long Lines has a roaming agreement with Cingular Wireless L.L.C., and the local carrier’s network “will be able to provide coverage in hard-to-serve areas currently missed by the national carriers,” Long Lines said in a statement. The company also will offer a one-number feature that will allow a cell phone and office or home phone to ring simultaneously.
According to the RCR Wireless News 2006 Wireless Carrier Database, Long Lines’ network covers a licensed population of 372,000 people. The company owns PCS D, E and F spectrum in the areas of Bismarck, N.D., the areas of Minnesota and North Dakota around Grand Forks, and the Sioux Falls area of Iowa and S.D.
