It's taken more than a year, but Verizon has just officially announced that it has completed its purchase of Rural Cellular, which you may also know by its business name, Unicel. This latest announcement follows a conditional approval from the FCC earlier this week, which required one of the two companies to sell licenses in six markets in order to "improve competition" -- a compromise Verizon seems to have been more than willing to accept. All told, Verizon will be forking over $2.66 billion in cash and assumed debt for the company, which will increase its customer base by more than 625,000, and expand its coverage area by 4.7 million people, including markets in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Alabama, Mississippi, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

Verizon Wireless announced its intentions to snap up Rural Cellular way back in July of last year, and as these things tend to go, it has taken a full 13 months for the FCC to green light the deal. Said agency has just issued a "conditional approval" for the acquisition, but it noted that one of the companies will be required to "sell licenses in six markets in order to improve competition." More specifically, the outfits will have to "shed licenses in several parts of Vermont, one area of New York state and two areas of Washington state." Nothing too earth-shattering, but it's good to see the books (almost) closed on this one.

[Via PhoneScoop]

Last year, Rural Cellular bought a handful of Minnesota markets from Alltel. No big deal, right? A little money changes hands, a few subscribers move from one carrier to another. As part of the sale, Alltel agreed to continue to service the customers until they could be fully migrated to Rural's systems -- problem is, they may have "serviced" them a little too hard, if you catch our drift. A lawsuit brought on by Rural claims that, among other things, Alltel hustled the affected customers really hard during the transition period to get them to switch back to Alltel and offered them "slipshod" service on Rural's transitional network to help make that decision a little easier. By the time all was said and done, subscriber churn in the markets was a sky-high 13 percent, certainly suggesting that there was some buffoonery going on. The suit seeks millions in damages on the $48 million deal -- and with Verizon's acquisition of Rural currently going through the regulatory process, it certainly seems like the outcome could have an effect.

[Thanks, Droo]