The City of Windom heard from three potential buyers for its community-owned telecom, Windomnet, and chose to accept an offer of $7.5 million from Federated Rural Electric and Broadband on Tuesday, July 28.
Steve Nasby, the city administrator, said the decision to sell Windomnet was a hard one for the city council, after the city had spent the past two decades building it up as a municipally owned provider for broadband internet, telecommunications and streaming.
“The city of Windom was working about two years ago with a couple of companies about how we could partner, expand services, things like that, and that turned into an unsolicited offer to purchase Windomnet,” Nasby said.
The city also received offers from MidCo and Southwest Broadband.
There’s another step…
Now that the city is finally accepting an offer, the next steps will be to get final approval from regulators like the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission.
A quick recap of Windowmnet’s history…
Windomnet was started by the city in 2004, and it currently provides service to over 2,000 households in and around the Windom area, with 1,660 internet, 560 phoneline, 340 video streaming customers.