Zayo Finds Some More UK Fiber to Buy

Zayo seems to have found some distressed fiber assets over in the northern UK to bring under its umbrella.  According to reports,  Geo Networks is acquiring what’s left of the network of Digital Region, an FTTP project in South Yorkshire.  Of course, Zayo purchased Geo just two months back.

Digital Region was a project to bring big bandwidth to the folks there in the towns of Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Sheffield and the surrounding region that started in 2008 and finished the first phase in 2011 with plans for more. But after spending some $160M and gaining only a few thousand subscribers, it just wasn’t working from a financial perspective. So last year they decided to just shut it off rather than keep it running, something that will supposedly happen next month.

It’s not clear just what piece of this Zayo and Geo are buying, and I haven’t found a map of the fiber just yet.  But a good guess is that it’s simply the regional/metro fiber loops they specialize in everywhere else.  The assets will give Zayo additional metro reach in the UK beyond their primary London footprint, hooking into the UK national and regional network assets Geo operated.

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Categories: Mergers and Acquisitions · Metro fiber