Telecom Ramblings

American Fiber Systems has recently hooked up no less than 8 major casinos in Las Vegas, according to a press release today.  The size of those casino hotels on the strip makes them pretty good traffic generators of course, you certainly can’t feed one with a few T1 pipes.  AFS is now staking its claim to the top spot amongst alternative fiber networks in the city, and I don’t have any reason to doubt the claim.  Vegas hasn’t been a hotbed of metro build-outs.  Amongst the more national metro footprints, Level 3 has only a few buildings on-net there, and while TW Telecom and XO don’t discuss details about individual markets I am not aware of a major presence as compared to other markets.   I believe TW Telecom entered the market in force only with the acquisition of Xspedius. The ILEC of course is CenturyTel, via Embarq and formerly Sprint – and Vegas is one of its largest markets.

AFS’s Las Vegas presence came along with Reno and Boise a little less than two years ago with its acquisition of IDACOMM, the communications subsidiary of the energy company IDACORP.  Since then, the company has clearly been investing in the assets.  Last year they put substantial effort into the Reno metro market, expanding deeper into Carson City amongst other things.  It has been a while now since AFS digested other fiber assets, might they be ready to take on some more?  No doubt their CEO will excoriate me over on his Telecom Straight Shooter blog for making the suggestion, but you never know.