East Wenatchee Based LocalTel Being Purchased By Ziply Fiber

Ziply Fiber is buying East Wenatchee-based LocalTel Communications.

Financial details for the acquisition have not been released,

LocalTel, on social media, acknowledged it was being bought out, saying it was limited on what could be revealed because negotiations were ongoing.

The company did say it would continue to be called LocalTel Communications and would continue to be locally managed.

In addition, it said the services provided would remain the same as would its customer service. It further said the service would continue to be provided by the PUD fiber networks currently being used.

LocalTel said further details would be released once the acquisition by Ziply Fiber is complete.

The company struggled with an email outage in December in which customers lost access to email service for several days, and lost all access to previous emails.

LocalTel said the outage was the result of a power interruption that damaged a server.

The purchase of LocalTel is the second acquisition of Ziply Fiber in North Central Washington. It purchased Ephtata based iFIBER Communications in December.

Ziply Fiber is headquartered in Kirkland, and has major offices in Everett, Beaverton, Oregon; and Hayden, Idaho.

The company says most of its executive team consists of former executives from AT&T, CenturyLink, and Wave Broadband.

Its primary services are Fiber Internet and phone for residential customers.

Zipley announced last September that it had raised $450 million to support fiber network expansion in the Northwest.

The company started operations in May 2020 after acquiring the Northwest operations of Frontier Communications in a $1.35 billion transaction.