By Kelly Hill

Telecom infrastructure provider BAI Communications is expanding in Europe and the UK with the acquisition of wireless infrastructure design, installation and management company Vilicom.

BAI is headquartered in Toronto and majority owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Earlier this year, BAI bought privately held infrastructure provider Mobilitie, which expanded its footprint in North America, particularly the US.

Financial terms of the Vilicom deal were not disclosed. Vilicom specializes in various aspects of designing, integrating and installing 4G and 5G cellular networks and has more than 1,500 deployments to date, according to BAI. Those include mobile network operators as well as Vilicom customers in health care, energy, real estate and hospitality, with major Vilicom projects including Dublin Airport T2, sports stadiums (including Irish stadium Croke Park), Bristol Myres Squibb’s biologics plant and an offshore windfarm in Moray East, Scotland where Vilicom designed a custom private network that covers 295 square kilometers. That particular project was an Open RAN private LTE network, and reportedly the first of its kind in the UK.

In a press release, BAI said that the Vilicom buy will “bring scale to new innovative connectivity solutions such as private 5G networks” and also noted that Vilicom has a communications-as-a-service platform that can serve indoor and smaller venues. BAI added that the purchase “supports [its] move to become one of the leading 5G connected-infrastructure players both in the region and worldwide.”

BAI already operates in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and in the United States through both Mobilitie and Transit Wireless, which is majority owned by BAI. In October, its NYC office moved into a new, expanded location to accommodate company growth. It also recently won a 20-year concession to provide mobile service for the London Underground, and a 20-year strategic partnership with Sunderland City Council in the UK to “create the UK’s most advanced smart city.”

In related news, BAI recently published a report which drew on a survey of more than 2,500 public transit users in New York, Sydney, Toronto, Hong Kong and London, and concluded that there is an “intensified need for continuous connectivity on public transport systems amid the global COVID-19 recovery.” The report said that 91 per cent of the passengers surveyed think that “seamless mobile coverage above and below ground is a feature of a world-class city.”