First it was Black Hills FiberCom, then PrairieWave.

Now, Knology.

Knology, the Georgia-based parent company of PrairieWave Communications, will announce Thursday that it is dropping the PrairieWave name and adopting the Knology brand for its South Dakota operations.

PrairieWave is the telephone, cable television and Internet provider that serves Rapid City and the Northern Hills. The company, based in Sioux Falls, also provides similar services in East River communities as well as parts of Minnesota and Iowa.

In April 2007, PrairieWave was acquired by Knology in a $255 million deal. Since then, the Black Hills operation became a division of Knology separate from the Sioux Falls office but retaining the PrairieWave name.

"Now, the company is bidding a fond farewell to the PrairieWave name and unveiling the Knology name and brand to South Dakota," Knology officials said in a media announcement on Tuesday.

Steve Schirber, general manager for the Black Hills division, said the name change was part of Knology's plan all along. But first, the company had to concentrate on other changes such as business practices, accounting and technology.

"It's time," he said about the name change.

He said Knology will replace signs on trucks, baseball fields, Rushmore Plaza Civic Center and other places where the PrairieWave name is displayed.

Knology, which trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange, is based in West Point, Ga. It has nearly 650,000 telephone, cable TV and broadband Internet connections, mostly to customers in the Southeast. Its service areas include Columbus, Ga., Huntsville, Ala., Panama City, Fla., Augusta, Ga., Charleston, S.C., and Knoxville, Tenn.

PrairieWave was a privately held firm created in September 2002 as a spin-off from McLeod USA.

At the time the Knology deal was announced, PrairieWave had 390 employees and 63,000 customers, most of them in South Dakota.

In 2005, PrairieWave paid $103 million in cash for Black Hills FiberCom, a telecommunications firm started from scratch seven years earlier by Rapid City-based Black Hills Corp.

When it launched FiberCom, the Rapid City utility and energy company was trying to diversify itself as it prepared for the expected deregulation of the utility industry.

The deregulation never arrived, and Black Hills Corp. decided to get back to its core businesses. Six months before it sold FiberCom, Black Hills Corp. acquired Cheyenne Light, Fuel & Power, a utility in Wyoming. It also is trying to expand its utility business into the Midwest with a pending deal to acquire utilities from Missouri-based Aquila.

Contact Dan Daly at 394-8421 or dan.daly@rapidcityjournal.com.