Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (Shentel) has confirmed that it completed the upgrade of the former nTelos network (acquired in May 2016) from 3G to 4G LTE on 30 September. Shentel committed USD240 million for the initial network upgrade and coverage expansion. As of 30 September Shentel noted that it had upgraded 854 sites to LTE; added 800MHz coverage and capacity to the networks; decommissioned 99 overlapping sites; and added 2.5GHz capacity to 197 sites. Going forward, Shentel expects that it will have built 60% of the 220 additional coverage sites required in West Virginia and southern Virginia by end-2017, with the remaining 40% to be built in 2018.
Virginia-based Shentel is the ‘exclusive PCS affiliate’ of Sprint in parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and portions of Kentucky and Ohio. It has now completed the migration of the acquired user base to the Sprint Affiliate model – one full quarter ahead of schedule.