Xplornet ramps up acquisitions, high-speed connectivity

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This article was published 06/04/2022 (1250 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Xplornet Communications Inc. has acquired Full Throttle Networks Inc., the second Manitoba Internet service provider it has bought in seven months.

The acquisition of Full Throttle and Swift High Speed in September allows the company to acquire close to 8,000 customers between the two.

In early December, Xplornet was awarded access to 3,200 kilometres of Manitoba Hydro Telecom-owned fibre optic network through a request for proposal process. That network, which Manitoba Hydro had built to maintain connectivity with its generating stations, has lots of excess capacity and its utilization is seen as integral to the broadband access for many of Manitoba’s severely under-serviced rural and northern communities.

Since Xplornet purchased Swift, construction is already underway to install fibre to the home for Swift’s 6,000 customers and the same may happen for Full Throttle’s 1,600 customers.

Dane Davis, the former co-owner of Full Throttle with Kael Onchulenko, could not say that would happen for sure, but he said, “Xplornet are the new good guys. We are doing this deal with an understanding that things will get better (for our customers) to a degree that we could have never funded.”

When its deal with the province was announced, Xplornet said it would spend about $200 million in Manitoba over the next two years and that 350 rural communities, including 30 First Nations, will benefit from increased connectivity.

Jordan Young, Xplornet’s vice-president business development, said that the work is progressing well.

He said, “Nearly half of the communities slated to benefit from our fixed wireless network, are already able to connect” to faster speeds.

“We will put shovels in the ground this build season in order to start rolling out our fibre-to-the-premise network,” he said. “The project remains on track to connect over 125,000 rural Manitobans to high-speed Internet by the end of 2023.”

While there are some reports that Xplornet is still experiencing delays in being able to connect more customers to the MHT backbone, others say that construction of fibre to the home is definitely ramping up.

Prior to the December deal between Hydro and Xplornet, Hydro had imposed a stop sell order for more than a year on new business with MHT as Manitoba Hydro undertook a re-organization of its non-core assets.

It meant that small ISPs such as Swift and Full Throttle could not embark on new developments even if they had the capital to do it.

Evan Schroeder, the CEO of Swift, said there are many new broadband construction projects underway even if Xplornet is experiencing some delays in access.

(Swift sold its network infrastructure and customers to Xplornet but retained its construction business, now called Swift Underground.)

“Now we are doing the exact same work we were doing before but we are laying fibre to the home at a much faster pace than we could have done on our own,” he said.

While it does have exclusive contract with Xplornet to do that work for its former customers in towns around Steinbach where it is based, it is currently also doing work for other ISP’s including RFNow and Broadband Communications North which focuses almost exclusively on First Nation work.

“We have been able to diversify based on the fact we are no longer in competition,” Schroeder said. “We still understand the market and understand how it should work and we are getting service to new customers or moving them from wireless back to fibre.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca