Rural Telephone Service Co. of Lenora, KS, said it has signed an agreement to acquire 12 Sprint exchanges in north central Kansas.

The deal covers 20 different communities and about 5400 access lines, increasing the size of Rural by roughly 50%. The exchanges include Burr Oak, Courtland, Esbon, Downs, Ionia, Lebanon, Luray, Osborne, Paradise, Republic, Russell, and Webber. Rural Telephone, a cooperative, currently serves around 10,000 access lines in 15 northwest Kansas counties. The new exchanges, which are contiguous with the eastern edge of Rural’s serving area, will be converted to a cooperative structure, said Larry Sevier, CEO of Rural Telephone.

“After we receive commission approval and close, we’ll make [those customers] members of the rural telephone cooperative and issue them a membership certificate,” he said.

The company also plans to embark on an upgrade of facilities. Currently the exchanges are served by one Nortel DMS 100 and several remotes.

“We’re going to start the process of rebuilding most of these exchanges,” Sevier said. “Some still don’t have broadband service and that’s the first thing we’ll do, maybe through some kind of wireless access.”

Several of the exchange should be familiar turf to Rural Telephone. Operating a CLEC arm, under the Nex-Tech brand the company has been targeting voice, data and video customers for several years in some of the same markets. Additionally, in Osborne Nex-Tech overbuilt Sprint with a fiber-to-the-premises network and managed to capture more than 80% of the market. In that particular case, Nex-Tech will transfer customer to Rural.