USConnect Holdings, a consortium formed to consolidate rural telcos, is buying The Livingston Telephone Company (Livingston Telephone). Livingston Telephone provides voice, video and high-speed Internet services to over 9,500 connections.  

USConnect says the acquisition will be followed by others.

Livingston Telephone’s 83 square-mile service area, located approximately 65 miles north of Houston, includes Livingston and surrounding rural areas of Polk County, Texas.

USConnect was formed in March 2013 to acquire rural and independent communications providers. 

USConnect is owned by Golden West Telecommunications of Wall, S.D., Horry Telephone Cooperative of Conway in South Carolina, Farmers Telephone Cooperative of Kingstree in South Carolina, Brazoria Telephone Company of Brazoria, Texas, and Dickey Rural Networks of Ellendale, N.D.

The formation of USConnect might be called part of a larger consolidation trend many have predicted must occur in the U.S. rural telephone industry, as soon as 2014.

In fact, consolidation is a trend observers often say will continue to happen in most segments of the communications market. You might argue small rural telcos are more susceptible than most, for reasons having to do with growing pressure in a business where scale is important, where significant new capital investment is required and where available customers are scarce.

About 45 percent of respondents to a recent NTCA survey have service areas 500 square miles or larger. Some 19 percent are at least 2,000 square miles.

Some 71 percent have customer densities in their service area of 10 residential customers per square mile or less. About 28 percent have customer densities of two residential customers per square mile or less.

The average survey respondent serves 4,259 residential and 1,428 business voice grade access lines. Adjusting for the impact of a few larger companies, whose size skews the median (arithmetic average), the typical respondent serves 1,785 residential and 443 business lines.

The typical respondent is 79 miles from its primary Internet connection, a statistic that probably also reflects the importance of middle mile backhaul connections for other service providers as well, including rural cable TV operators and wireless Internet service providers.