Hargray Communications is a telecommunications provider based on

Hilton Head Island, South Carolina Hilton Head Island, sometimes referred to as simply Hilton Head, is a Lowcountry resort town and barrier island in Beaufort County, South Carolina, United States. It is northeast of Savannah, Georgia, and southwest of Charleston. The island is ...

, United States. It operates internet throughout the

Lowcountry The Lowcountry (sometimes Low Country or just low country) is a geographic and cultural region along South Carolina's coast, including the Sea Islands. The region includes significant salt marshes and other coastal waterways, making it an impor ...

region of South Carolina and the Savannah region of Georgia. Hargray has a monopoly on parts of the Lowcountry offering

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

broadband Internet In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals at a wide range of frequencies and Internet traffic types, that enables messages to be sent simultaneously, used in fast internet connections. ...

, and

landline A landline (land line, land-line, main line, home phone, fixed-line, and wireline) is a telephone connection that uses metal wires or optical fiber telephone line for transmission, as distinguished from a mobile cellular network, which us ...

services. Hargray formerly resold cellular phone service through

Cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by st ...

History

Hargray was founded in nearby

Hardeeville Hardeeville is a city in Jasper County, South Carolina, Jasper and Beaufort County, South Carolina, Beaufort counties in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The population was 7,473 as of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, an increase of ov ...

under the name ''Harcan Telephone''. Throughout the following decades, Hargray expanded in Bluffton and eventually onto Hilton Head Island. By the 1980s, Hargray began offering cable television service to customers in the region in addition to telephone service. In 2007, Hargray was acquired by Quadrangle Capital Partners. Several years later, in 2010, Quadrangle unsuccessfully attempted to sell Hargray. In May 2021, Hargray was acquired by

Cable One Cable One, Inc. is an American broadband communications provider. Under the Sparklight brand, it provides service to 21 states and 900,000 residential and business customers. It is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, though it does not serve that ...

Data Publishing

Hargray established Data Publishing in 1986. It is responsible for publishing all of the Horry Telephone Directories. The company continued to expand and publish directories for other companies including

Horry Telephone Cooperative Horry Telephone Cooperative (HTC) is a Telephone company, telecommunications cooperative in Horry County, South Carolina, in the United States. It was founded in 1952 to serve the rural areas of Horry County where it was unprofitable for nationa ...

and

Windstream Windstream Holdings, Inc., also doing business as Windstream Communications or Windstream, is a provider of voice and data network communications (broadband, VoIP, MPLS), and managed services ( virtual servers, managed firewall, data storage, clo ...

, among others. Under Quadrangle's ownership of Hargray, the company was ultimately sold to Horry Telephone Cooperative. The deal was completed in September 2012.

Acquisitions

Hargray has acquired several cable systems in its service area, including Charter's system in

Beaufort Beaufort may refer to: People and titles * Beaufort (surname) * House of Beaufort, English nobility * Duke of Beaufort (England), a title in the peerage of England * Duke of Beaufort (France), a title in the French nobility Places Polar regions * ...

as well as a few systems from

Shentel Shentel, officially Shenandoah Telecommunications Company, is a publicly traded telecommunications company headquartered in Edinburg, Virginia. It operates a digital wireless and wireline network in rural Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pen ...

. In February 2020, Hargray acquired Electronet, a fiber-based broadband communications company operating in

Tallahassee, Florida Tallahassee ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Florida. It is the county seat and only incorporated municipality in Leon County. Tallahassee became the capital of Florida, then the Florida Territory, in 1824. In 2020, the populatio ...

Technology

Multiple technologies are employed depending on region, all reaching from the core headend and central office in Pritchardville, South Carolina. For television, Hargray deploys

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...

QAM Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is the name of a family of digital modulation methods and a related family of analog modulation methods widely used in modern telecommunications to transmit information. It conveys two analog message signa ...

digital TV service over coaxial cable. IPTV is handled via the Ericsson Mediaroom platform. Voice services ( POTS) are carried over both

VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), also called IP telephony, is a method and group of technologies for the delivery of voice communications and multimedia sessions over Internet Protocol (IP) networks, such as the Internet. The terms Internet t ...

and copper

telephone line A telephone line or telephone circuit (or just line or circuit industrywide) is a single-user circuit on a telephone communication system. It is designed to reproduce speech of a quality that is understandable. It is the physical wire or ot ...

. Internet is provided by either

DOCSIS Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) is an international telecommunications standard that permits the addition of high-bandwidth data transfer to an existing cable television (CATV) system. It is used by many cable televisio ...

3.0 cable modems,

ADSL Asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) is a type of digital subscriber line (DSL) technology, a data communications technology that enables faster data transmission over copper telephone lines than a conventional voiceband modem can provide. ...

modems, or

fiber to the home Fiber to the ''x'' (FTTX; also spelled "fibre") or fiber in the loop is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber to provide all or part of the local loop used for last mile telecommunications. As fiber optic ...

. Hargray also provides public WiFi service and dial-up to customers. As of September 27, 2012, Hargray has completed an integration of 7,000 Charter customers in the Beaufort, South Carolina area. Hargray Communications Group has 350 total employees across all of its locations and generates $101.43 million in 2017 for sales (USD).

References

External links

Hargray
Hilton Head Island, South Carolina Cable television companies of the United States Telecommunications companies of the United States Internet service providers of the United States Companies based in South Carolina Telecommunications companies established in 1949 1949 establishments in South Carolina 2021 mergers and acquisitions {{US-telecom-company-stub