Independent telco Windstream Communications has taken another step in its conversion from rural residential telco to business services provider, announcing the acquisition of Business Only Broadband (BOB), a small fixed wireless broadband player based in the Chicago suburbs.

The deal helps Windstream Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: WIN) broaden its variety of access offerings as it continues to make its case as a business, enterprise and cloud services provider. The acquisition follows other Windstream buys themed around business services, such as the deals for Paetec and Hosted Solutions. (See Windstream Completes Paetec Buy and Windstream Buys Hosted Solutions.)

BOB was founded in 2006 by veterans of CLEC progenitor Metropolitan Fiber Systems, and is headed by AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) alum Alan Rosenberg. It currently offers Ethernet services in Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City and northern New Jersey. That doesn't give Windstream much of a footprint to start with, but the company said in a statement announcing the deal that it will expand BOB's offerings to more markets beginning next year. (See BOB Deploys DragonWave.)

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Windstream has not yet responded to a request for comment, so we're not sure how long the idea of acquiring BOB gestated at Windstream, but surely -- or so we would really like to imagine -- there was a point when Windstream execs sat down to discuss possible acquisitions for expanding the company's portfolio of business services with the addition of fixed wireless broadband, and when presented with a range of regional players to buy, debated and argued and talked over one another, until one of them eventually said, "What about BOB?"

If it didn’t happen that way, we'd rather not know.

— Dan O'Shea, Managing Editor, Light Reading